Paper Reading #6: It's Complicated

It's Complicated: How Romantic Partners Use Facebook

CHI 2012, May 5-10, Austin, Texas, USA

Authors:
Xuan Zhao — She is a PhD student at Cornell University working in the Collaboration Technology Laboratory.  Xuan is mainly interested in CHI because of her background in psychological needs of users and organizations that technology can provide.
Victoria Schwanda Sosik — She is also a PhD student at Cornell but works in the ReImagination Laboratory under Dr. Cosley.  She loves technology and studying the way people can use technology to better their physical and psychological needs.
Dr. Dan Cosley — A professor at Cornell interested also in how people interact with computers, especially with how they use their memory.  He, with a team, has come up with a project called Pensieve that helps peole remember things from the past using their Facebook, Twitter, and Picasa.

Summary

This group studied Facebook and the effect it has on its romantic users.  Much of their research found out a lot about how digital communication can affect romantic relationships.  Their research culminated by finding that digital communication, specifically public ones like Facebook, cause internal and external tensions to arise at the same time.  People find it confusing to figure out what to share on Facebook and what not to.

Related Work

1. Crossing boundaries: Identity management and student/faculty relationships on the Facebook
2. Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships
3. " I'll poke you. You'll poke me!" Self-disclosure, social attraction, predictability and trust as important predictors of Facebook relationships
4. The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites
5. The development of romantic relationships in adolescence
6. I'll see you on “Facebook”: The effects of computer-mediated teacher self-disclosure on student motivation, affective learning, and classroom climate
7. More information than you ever wanted: does Facebook bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy?
8. Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace
9. Online and offline social networks: Use of social networking sites by emerging adults
10. College students' social networking experiences on Facebook

This work is not really novel at all.  Many different types of research have been made on relationships and technology's influence over them.  This research seems very trivial and hardly an advancement on past research.

Evaluation

Their data was all completely qualitative, gathered from subjects who subjectively answer questions and recorded their Facebook doings.  They collected these opinions from the users point of view and analyzed them to find a common trend among relationships.

Discussion

I enjoyed reading the article because I feel it is very applicable to the college circles I'm a part of.