Consequences of Online Social Networking Behavior

I really enjoyed reading Antecedents and Consequences of Online Social Networking Behavior: The Case of Facebook by Adam Acar.  I liked how the article was setup with some background information about the different social networks and how popular each one was at the time this article was written.  I also liked how Acar defined the different factors he would be looking at such as anxiety, self-esteem, body image, extroversion, and gender.  I thought Acar asked the right questions when there wasn't a consistent view on a certain area and I agreed with all of his hypothesis that he made throughout the experiment.

As the initial goal of the experiment was to compare online social networks to real social networks in terms of size, I knew that the online social network would be bigger in the end.   The text states, real social networks include "family members, relatives, neighbors and colleagues as well as friends" (Acar 77), while online includes all of these but also people that are acquaintances and strangers.  I wasn't surprised to see the result that Facebook had one and a half times the number more than a real social network.  I looked at my own Facebook and most of the hypothesis were spot on as girls typically had more friends than guys and that people with low self-esteem had more strangers as "friends" on their profile.  Overall, this article was helpful in looking at social networks in a different light in regards to how the different factors listed above effect a person's profile.  Although Acar had a small sample size, his work was influential because it seems to be some of the first on this topic.