Personally I found it quite repulsive in terms of using the discourse of diversity (thus reenacting racial and ethnic boundaries) for marketing purposes. Am I overpessimistic? Didem 2009/12/17 live <human.factor.one@gmail.com>

I found it quite interesting. I was intrigued and surprised by the relative saturation of Asian users.

(Btw Facebook's sociologist is Cameron from MIT Media Lab, and they sourced from Census Genealogy and used mixture modeling, so I feel comfortable about how the data was gathered and used.)

-Sharon

------------------------- Sharon Greenfield Marylhurst University http://www.sharoncountry.com @SharonG

On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:57 AM, Seda Guerses wrote:

...

i am very curious to hear what people on this list think of this note from facebook? s.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=205925658858&id=8394258414&ref=mf

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More on this issue, selection bias is present. According to the 2009 Report for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund by Robert W. Fairlie University of California, Santa Cruz and National Poverty Center, University of Michigan "The Digital Divide in the US is large and does not appear to be disappearing soon. Blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have access to home computers than are white, non-Latinos (50.6 and 48.7 percent compared to 74.6 percent). They are also less likely to have Internet access at home (40.5 and 38.1 percent compared to 67.3 percent). • Asians have home computer and Internet access rates that are higher than white, non-Latino rates (77.7 and 70.3 percent), and Native Americans have lower rates (51.6 and 40.9 percent)."

From here the study of Facebook has an implicit sample selection bias. Minorities are less likely to have access. Individuals that belong to minorities groups and have access are a selected group of highly skilled and educated that are not different in their social characteristics to the whites having access. Facebook results do not reflect the state of social and digital inequalities in the population. Furthermore, is blurres the real divisions in society.

Gustavo Mesch, Associate Professor University of Haifa. Chair, Communication and Information Technologies Section American Sociological Association On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:59:11 +0100, Nils Zurawski <nils.zurawski@uni-hamburg.de> wrote:

which facebook is meant? The North American one? What about facebook in general? then those "ethnic" categories would not work, because, if you take the global perspective, facebook is as diverse as the countries from which its participants come... I find this survey rather limited and of no great use beyond the US/Canada (if that is included anyway).

Also, those categories would be useless anywhere else in the world... facebook in Asia - how about asian ethnicities there???

best

nilz

At 23:34 Uhr +0200 17.12.2009, =?ISO-8859-9?Q?Didem_T=FCrko=F0lu?= wrote:

...

Personally I found it quite repulsive in terms of using the discourse of diversity (thus reenacting racial and ethnic boundaries) for marketing purposes. Am I overpessimistic? Didem

2009/12/17 live <human.factor.one@gmail.com>

...

I found it quite interesting. I was intrigued and surprised by the relative saturation of Asian users.

(Btw Facebook's sociologist is Cameron from MIT Media Lab, and they sourced from Census Genealogy and used mixture modeling, so I feel comfortable about how the data was gathered and used.)

-Sharon

------------------------- Sharon Greenfield Marylhurst University http://www.sharoncountry.com @SharonG

On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:57 AM, Seda Guerses wrote:

...

i am very curious to hear what people on this list think of this note from facebook? s.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=205925658858&id=8394258414&ref=mf

...

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http://aoir.org

...

Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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I'd also note that the *great* value in a study like this is that it's revealing findings from high-quality, proprietary data. To my great frustration, I've regularly found that the good traffic data is almost universally proprietary in nature, leaving academic researchers at a substantial disadvantage when trying to understand web traffic patterns and online community development. Better to have organizations publicizing their institutional research, complete with marketing categories that help them sell online ad space, than have them conduct it in secrecy and leave the research community in the dark. -Dave On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Kevin Guidry <krguidry@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 8:27 AM, gustavo <gustavo@soc.haifa.ac.il> wrote:

...

More on this issue, selection bias is present.

I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that of this study since it's not attempting to generalize the results to the entire population (I don't think; did I miss that?). It would be nice if the Fb researchers were to exhibit more awareness of the access and participation inequalities in the US and abroad but I'm not sure that we can blame them for those inequalities or find fault in their internal-looking research that seeks only to evaluate their population of users in situ.

Personally, I am slightly annoyed by how casually the terms "race" and "ethnicity" are tossed about and used interchangeably. It's often necessary to mix the two ideas due to the limitations of one's data, particularly when using an extant data set, but it should still explicitly be recognized as a limitation.

Kevin _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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-- Dave Karpf, PhD Postdoctoral Research Associate Taubman Center for Public Policy Brown University www.davidkarpf.com davekarpf@gmail.com

I read it as a polite reply to (the hype over) danah boyd's blog post on the differences between MySpace & Facebook: boyd herself never reduced the argument to black vs. whites, but that's the reading everybody had. They had to reply to it, and they wisely avoided to stirr up more flames at the time (their silence was a good pointer that the intuition was onto something, as this study indicates). Now that the result is far less “scandal prone” they closed the question with an interesting approach. But the intended reader was the science-skiming media, hence the rather sound methodolocial base, but the not so academic presentation of the results: with some work, they could have published somethign based on that for, say, ICWSM, but they haven't (so far). Doing so, they also don't have to justify their use of too much, too personal data — the kind no IRB would let any academic handle. By the way, I'd love to have some academic lobbying from you guys to ask Facebook for some run time on that database: they have gold in their hands to answer so many questions — and we are all interested not in detailed data, but the statistical results. If we can negociate that they let us run some scripts, provided those can't possibly reveal any personal information, won't run against their corporate interest, and could help social science, that would be amazing. Maybe some Ivy League universities already pay for that. That offer would lead to lots of interesting discussion on what makes Facebook users different from the general Internet users, way more then what they can have internally—something valuable for the company. About doing the same study abroad: Outside of Nothern America there are no universal, easy to study, significant social class markers; where race carries a similar stigma as it does in the US, such studies are often prohibited. I have no doubt Facebook uses similar approaches for marketing purposes, but any details would be commercially invaluable, and the insights probably as “dull” as what they are in the US after a few years of significant presence.