Academic/Non-academic Use of Social
Networking Software and “Identity Crisis”
Paper presented at NET@EDU 2009
Laura Brewer, Ph.D.
Chong Ho Yu, Ph.D.
Samuel DiGangi, Ph.D.
Angel Jannasch-Pennell, Ph.D.
Applied Learning Technologies
Institute (alt^I)
• We are dedicated to the advancement of
higher education through research,
collaboration, and action
• We are comprised of six core areas:
– Research and Community Outreach
– Learning Technologies
– New Media Studio
– Distributed Learning
– Technology Integration
– Media Distribution Systems
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Overview
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Research Question
Brief Review of the Literature
Project Methodology
Findings
Implications
Future Research
Q/A
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Research Questions
• Identity theft or IDM is NOT the focus of
this study; rather, our focus is about selfidentification or self-profiling.
• How are today’s undergraduate students
using social networking software (SNS)
applications as part of their campus lives
in both academic and non-academic
ways? Is there profile segmentation?
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Definition
• Social Network vs. Social Networking
– danah boyd and Nicole Ellison differentiate
and prefer “Social Network,” as the emphasis
is on the ability to articulate and communicate
one’s social network rather than on the
process of initiating relationships (2007)
– We use the term “Social Networking” in this
study because it was the most commonly
term used by our student population
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History of Social Networking
Sites
• 1995 = Classmates.com founded
• 1997 = Six Degrees of Separation
founded
• 2002 = Friendster.com founded (dating 
playful)
• 2003 = MySpace.com founded
• 2004 = Orkut.com founded
• 2004 = Facebook.com founded
(Wikipedia.org)
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Social Networking & Education
• The Horizon Project’s Call for Scholarship
identified social networking tools as
possible educational tools for building
learning communities (October 2007)
• Other research has focused on student
use of social networking applications, and
other technology, for social, out-of-school
learning (Hsi, 2007)
• No mention of presentation or selfprofiling.
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SNS as “Walled Garden”
• Nishant Kaushik: SNS are popular only
because there is no internet-wide identity
management scheme.
• Bex Huff: SNS is a “walled garden.”
• Really?
• It doesn’t need identity theft to make SNS
a potentially dangerous place; selfidentification is dangerous enough.
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Self-identification
in a Virtual world
• Communications in a virtual world like
Facebook or MySpace is de-contextualized.
• Friendster motivated people to grapple with
explicit presentations of self, creatively build
playful networks.
• Users are in a “loose” mode.
• Users have no control of multiple
disconnected audience.
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An example of out of
control
• A 26-year old teacher in San Francisco created
her profile when all of her SNS friends joined
the service. After a group of her students joined
the service, they questioned her about her drug
habits and her friendship with a pedophile.
Although her profile had no reference to drugs,
many of her friends had both. Furthermore, one
of her friends had crafted a profile that
contained an image of him in a Catholic
schoolgirl uniform with testimonials referencing
his love of small girls. While his friends knew
this to be a joke, the teacher’s students did not
(boyd & Heer, 2006)
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Head Hunters
• Users were not aware that headhunters
were actively lurking on SNS in order to
document candidates’ “extracurricular”
life.”
• Nevy Valentine was horrified when she
opened the San Francisco Chronicle to
discover that her profile was featured,
including her occupation of “corporate
time bomb.”
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Access to SNS by strangers
• Stutzman (2005)
IBM study
• Joan Morris DiMicco, David R. Millen
• The impact of SNS on graduates
• Three types of SNS users in IBM:
– College days
– Dressed to impress
– Living in the business world
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Example of collegeday mentality
• Mr. X is an active Facebook user, beginning in 2005,
checking every day, multiple times a day. He primarily
uses the site for maintaining friendships with close, but
geographically distant, friends. He has over 200
friends on the site, 35 of which are employees he met
at new hire events. When he joined the company, he
did not change anything about his profile or the
pictures of himself. His current profile links to many
photos of him drinking alcohol (including directly out of
a beer keg) and attending numerous college parties.
He feels that Facebook is “for fun” and relates only to
“personal life” and hopes that if his manager ever did
see this page would understand that it has “nothing to
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do with his professional life.”
Example of “dress to
impressed”
• Before starting his job, Mr. Y purposefully
“cleansed” all information about himself on the
internet: from Facebook, his blog, and his
personal website. In particular, he removed all
photos of himself involving “drinking alcohol.”
– Actually after things are posted on the Internet, they
stay there forever! People have a way to reveal
“deleted” information.
– Like a political campaign, the candidate “checks”
his/her own past over the Internet to see if any
negative things might be used by his/her opponents.
But usually it is too late (e.g. sex jokes in email).
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Example of “Living in the
Business World”
• Ms. A joined Facebook at the urging of her coworkers.
Since joining, she has posted dozens of photos of
herself and has received dozens of wall posts from her
coworkers. Most of her Facebook friends are
coworkers whom she started with at the same time.
These are people she goes to lunch with and
socializes with after work. She works closely with
some, but others could be considered as part of her
extended work network.
– Conservative strategy: Stay away from strangers and people that
you don’t know enough. But this type of conservative SNS users
are mostly found in the business world. College kids love to reach
out to strangers.
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Project Methodology
• Partnered with the Office of Residential
Life for this project
• Online survey
– Open and closed ended items
– Designed to gather data about student use of
social networking applications
– Estimated completion time - 10 to 12 minutes
• Data Collection Sept. 2008
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Project Methodology Continued
• Recruitment Sept. 2008
– Email to all 5346 undergraduate students
– 11 day data collection period
– Initial invitation and two reminders to those
who had not responded
– Under 18 years were required to opt-out
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Project Methodology Continued
• We did not use “leading” questions such as:
– Rate the importance of the following statement: It is
important for me to present myself on SNS in a
positive fashion to impress my professor and future
employer.
– Have you ever posted any photos of yourself on
SNS that may affect your image (e.g. drinking)?
• Rather, we use open-ended questions to see
whether the themes of “self-identification,”
“image building” …etc. emerge.
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Project Methodology Continued
• Descriptive statistics: we avoid prematurely test
pre-determined hypotheses; rather, we want to
understand the phenomenon first.
• Text mining for extracting common themes from
open-ended responses.
– It is NOT counting the frequency of “words.”
– Computational Linguistics: Use AI algorithms to analyze
the context of text, to find common patterns.
– E.g. “I use Facebook to organize study groups,” “To hold
study sessions”  Study groups.
Response Rate
• 21% (N=1140 respondents)
• To examine the representativeness, we
compared respondents to the population
on 5 demographic variables:
– Gender
– Residency
– Citizenship
– Race
– Age
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Population/Respondents
Female-AZ Res-US Citizen
95.7%
58.7%
50.2%
Female
50.7%
57.0%
AZ Resident
Population
91.8%
US Citizen
Respondents
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Population/Respondents
Race
70.2%
64.6%
18.2%
14.2%
6.8%
9.4%
Asian Or Pacific
Islander
6.9%
4.6%
Black
2.0% 3.2%
Hispanic
Population
American
Indian/Alaskan
Native
Caucasian/White
Respondents
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Population/Respondents
Age
78.1% 76.20%
19.5%
20.2%
2.4%
18 Years
19 Years
Population
2.0%
20+ Years
Respondents
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Social Networking Site Use
93.2%
88.6%
62.5%
27.0%
4.0% 2.8%
Any SNS
3.4%
10.5%
8.1%
Facebook
Active User
Past User
MySpace
Never Used
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Findings
Students are less able to articulate value of
Academic SNS use (serious) than of nonAcademic SNS use (for fun).
Self-identification/presentation or imaging
building is not an expressed concern by
students.
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First Used a SNS
• Age first used any SNS
– 32.8% respondents were 14 years or younger
– 58.8% were 15-17 years
– 18.4% were 18 or older
• Which SNS did you use first?
– 84.2% MySpace
– 13.0% Facebook
– Others < 3%
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Preferred - Why
• 75.8% Facebook
– New friends use
Facebook
– For college
students
– Design: simple,
structured
• 23.9% MySpace
– Old friends use
MySpace
– Most familiar
– Design: ability to
customize/create
– Fun/music
– “Safer”
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Frequency of SNS Login
63.4%
60.9%
30.8%
27.0%
23.7%
20.1%
18.8%
14.2%
12.3%
5.4%
Any SNS
18.6%
4.7%
Facebook
Several Times a Day
At Least Once a Week
MySpace
At Least Once a Day
Less than Once a Week
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Measuring Social Networking
Experiences
• # Friends
• # Hours per Week Spent on SNS
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# Friends on All SNS by
Preferred SNS
38.2%
30.8%
24.1%
20.2%
17.9%
20.1%
11.6%
19.6%
11.0%
6.5%
50 or Fewer
51-100
101-200
Pref Facebook
2 = 3.702E1; P<.001
201-300
301 or More
Pref MySpace
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# Friends on Preferred SNS by
Preferred SNS
36.7%
29.1%
25.7%
21.9%
18.9%
14.0%
11.9%
50 or Fewer
14.4%
51-100
14.4%
101-200
Pref Facebook
2 = 2.258E1; P<.001
201-300
13.0%
301 or More
Pref MySpace
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# Hrs Per Week on All SNS by
Preferred SNS
27.2%
26.8%
24.4%
21.9%
19.6%
17.0%
17.9%
17.0%
14.7%
13.5%
1 hour or
less
2-3 hours
4-5 hours
Pref Facebook
2 = 3.544; n.s.
6-10 hours
11 or more
hours
Pref MySpace
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Importance Preferred SNS Non Campus Friends/Contacts
High school classmates
83.7%
Friends I do not see regularly
79.1%
Siblings
68.3%
Parents
61.3%
Coworkers
59.5%
Other family members
59.4%
Friends I see regularly
58.5%
Potential job contacts
People I met online
Acquaintances
57.3%
43.2%
32.6%
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Importance Preferred SNS Campus Friends/Contacts
ASU academic advisors
51.3%
ASU faculty
48.9%
ASU students that I see in
person
My ASU roommate
45.7%
44.4%
ASU classmates that I see in
person
44.0%
Friends from my residence hall
that I see in person
43.6%
Friends from my residence hall
that I have not met in person
ASU classmates that I have not
met in person
ASU students that I have not
met in person
39.0%
37.1%
36.0%
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Does Your Preferred SNS
Improve or Enrich Your…
• Academic life at ASU?
– 37.4% Facebook Users say “Yes”
– 15.3% of MySpace Users say “Yes”
• Non-Academic life at ASU?
– 70.3% Facebook Users say “Yes”
– 44.2% of MySpace Users say “Yes”
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Current Use of Preferred SNS
to Improve/Enrich Academics
• Current Use (N=275)
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•
Concept map yielded from text mining
– Bigger circles: higher frequency; Bolder lines: Stronger connections.
•
No one mentions “image”, “presentation,” “identification,”
“profile,” “career”, “job,” “professional” …etc.
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Possible Use of Preferred SNS
to Improve/Enrich Academics
• Could Use (N=773)
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Preferred SNS as an Obstacle
to Enriching Academic Life
• Cheating/Perceived Cheating: This will stay on
the record.
“Plagiarism and cheating. You think you are helping
someone but you are just setting them further back.”
“The only potential issue I could see is if I was getting
help from a classmate online, and they were giving me
advice on how to solve an equation, or what to put in a
paper. If another classmate saw that message, they
could possibly use it and write something similar as me,
and I could possibly get accused of cheating or
something.”
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Preferred SNS as an Obstacle
to Enriching Academic Life
• “false information, biased opinions, noncredible sources”
– These will stay in the record, too.
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Use of Preferred SNS to Improve/
Enrich Non-Academic Life
• Current Use (N=523) and Could Use (N=684)
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• Concept maps yielded from text mining
• Again, no one mentions “image”, “presentation,”
“identification,” “profile,” “career”, “job,”
“professional” …etc.
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Implications
• Academic use is limited; SNS is still a “playful”
thing.
• Despite posting personal information on public
websites, student responses seem to suggest an
“illusion of privacy” and that SNS are used
primarily for communication.
• Campus SNS program initiatives, whether
academic or non-academic, should be mindful of
SNS as a presentation or image building tool that
may affect their future.
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Our Future Research
• This is an initial project - exploratory…and
we have more exploring to do
• Follow-up focus groups could be helpful
• Would like to examine specific user
patterns within identified academic and
non-academic campus SNS groups or
networked contacts
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Share Findings
• Contact us @ alti.asu.edu
– Laura Brewer - lbrewer@asu.edu
– Chong Ho (Alex) Yu - alex.yu@asu.edu
– Sam DiGangi - sam@asu.edu
– Angel Jannasch-Pennell - angel@asu.edu
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