The guys who run the Freakonomics blog posed that very question to five bright insiders — academics and tech execs — who spend much of their lives thinking about such matters.
Most of them conclude that social networks do benefit their users, though all of them acknowledge that the size of the benefits are hard to quantify and that social networking is too new to conclude anything for certain.
Here’s a jargon-laden though interesting suggestion of hard data from Nicole Ellison, assistant professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University:
Bridging social capital reflects the benefits we receive from our “weak ties” — people we don’t know very well but who provide us with useful information and ideas. These students were using Facebook to increase the size of their social network, and therefore their access to more information and diverse perspectives.
The bit about the benefits of accessing “more diverse information” strikes me as academic idealism, but translate that to using weak ties to discover and land good jobs or good business deals. In many ways, ties like that make the world go round, so that’s a pretty strong argument for social networking.
Read the whole post here, and make sure to follow some of the links.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Entries (RSS)