On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data
Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate "friends," compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook closes out 2007 with its data practices under pressure from every direction: digital media buyers have just forgiven the company for a string of Beacon blunders earlier in December, more than 1,500 users are running ads on their own profiles against site rules, and the platform has just outmaneuvered Google in the OpenSocial developer race. Against that backdrop, this story adds an academic front — scholars quietly treating the daily activity of roughly 1,700 juniors at one East Coast college as a research dataset.
The framing builds on the year's earlier skepticism about how students present themselves online: June's Deconstructing Facebook took apart the platform's social mechanics, and October's The Fakebook Generation argued the site had turned campus life into performance. What is new here is that the audience for all that self-exposure now includes researchers — and the students do not know it.
First-order effects
- Roughly 1,700 students at one East Coast college are having their friend-making, movie-preference and messaging behavior studied without their knowledge, making them de facto human subjects with no consent process.
- The researchers involved get a live, unfiltered behavioral dataset that no lab recruitment could match — at the cost of operating outside the norms that normally govern research on people.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's handling of user data faces a second line of scrutiny alongside the Beacon ad controversy: if advertisers were asked to forgive data missteps, students and their universities may be less forgiving when they learn coursework and socializing became someone's study population.
- Other scholars watching this will see social networks as newly legible research terrain, pushing more departments to mine platforms rather than run traditional surveys — and forcing ethics boards to decide whether public-by-default posting counts as consent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the university becomes a downstream consumer of platform data, entangling academic legitimacy with companies whose incentives are commercial — a structural dependency that predates any formal data-sharing deals.
- The gap between what users think they are sharing (friends, cybercocktails) and what institutions extract from it sets up the consent-and-surveillance debate that will shadow social networking research and, eventually, regulators.
The trend: Academic research is converging on social networks as both subject and data source, with informed-consent norms lagging well behind what platforms make observable.