Table Of ContentK&I
F K Kathrin Knautz,
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Written by leading scholars investigating the impact of Web 2.0., this h Katsiaryna S. Baran (Eds.)
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collected volume gathers a broad spectrum of social science and information T i
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science articles about Facebook. It looks into facets of users, such as age, sex, S
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and culture, and into facets of use, e.g. privacy behavior after the Snowden O n FACETS OF
affair, unfriending on Facebook, or Facebook addiction, as well as into F a
quality perceptions. F u
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THE SERIES: KNOWLEDGE & INFORMATION
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Knowledge and Information (K&I) is a peer-reviewed information science K y USE AND USERS
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book series appearing as a print and as an ebook version, publishing high a
quality research monographs and topic-specifi c collections of papers as well. S
It covers information science to the full extent and alludes additionally to .
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neighboring sciences such as computer science, computational linguistics, a
(information) business administration, and library science. The language of r
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publication is English. n
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Kathrin Knautz, M.A., PhD, .)
studied Information Science
and Language Technology at
Heinrich-Heine-University in
Düsseldorf (HHU), Germany. She
is a researcher and lecturer at
the Department of Information
Science at HHU.
Katsiaryna S. Baran
studied German and English
philology in Polozk, Belarus and
Information Science at Heinrich-
Heine-University in Düsseldorf
(HHU), Germany. She is a research
assistant at the Department of KNOWLEDGE & INFORMATION
Information Science at HHU.
www.degruyter.com
ISBN 978-3-11-041935-1
ISSN 1868-842X
Facets of Facebook
Knowledge & Information
Studies in Information Science
Editor-in-chief
Wolfgang G. Stock (Düsseldorf, Germany)
Editorial Board
Ronald E. Day (Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A.)
Sonja Gust von Loh (Düsseldorf, Germany) – Associate Editor
Richard J. Hartley (Manchester, U.K.)
Robert M. Hayes (Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.)
Peter Ingwersen (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Michel J. Menou (Les Rosiers sur Loire, France)
Stefano Mizzaro (Udine, Italy)
Christian Schlögl (Graz, Austria)
Sirje Virkus (Tallinn, Estonia)
Facets of
Facebook
Use and Users
Edited by
Kathrin Knautz and Katsiaryna S. Baran
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of
libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative
designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the
initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org
ISBN 978-3-11-041935-1
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-041816-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-041820-0
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2016 Kathrin Knautz and Katsiaryna S. Baran,
publiziert von Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
♾ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Preface
This anthology presents state-of-the-art research pertaining to information
science and empirical study on the social network service (SNS) Facebook.
Over the past decade, online social networking sites have revolutionized the
ways we communicate with our friends, groups, and communities, and have fun-
damentally changed how we approach numerous everyday activities. Without
a doubt, the technology has introduced new opportunities for understanding
social behavior and for building socially intelligent systems and networks. These
variations affect modern-day research due to the continuously updated stream of
user-generated content and huge amounts of such data posted on and hosted by
social media platforms.
These phenomena have motivated our assembling the following articles for
publication as an anthology. We believe they address the most current informa-
tion science interest as regards Facebook. Our ambition in doing so has been to
reflect a wide range of study and results concerning our analysis of this SNS with
implications for interdisciplinary fields such as the social sciences, law, infor-
mation literacy, and history. Our anthology includes original articles on different
topics related to Facebook, including such user facets as age, sex, and culture,
as well as facets of use, for example, privacy behavior, unfriending on Facebook,
Facebook addiction, and perceptions of quality. Nearly every aspect of Facebook
use has received careful attention by the authors contributing to this book.
The anthology is composed of the following chapters reflecting both uses and
users of the SNS, and pays particular attention to the following facets:
– Chapter 1: Unfriending. This chapter highlights unfriending behavior on
Facebook and the categories of friends most often unfriended on this SNS,
the causes prompting one person to unfriend others, and the emotions expe-
rienced by both those unfriending and those being unfriended.
– Chapter 2: Photo publication. This chapter discusses adolescent image dis-
semination behavior on Facebook in terms of age, gender, and privacy set-
tings. It especially focuses on the sexting aspect.
– Chapter 3: Addiction. This chapter presents methods used to measure Face-
book addiction. The authors focus on Facebook addiction scales and factors
that may lead to too much as well as addictive Facebook usage.
– Chapter 4: Gaming. This chapter examines Facebook social games in con-
junction with social interactivity and play experiences as well as the role of
game play in players’ everyday lives.
– Chapter 5: Information literacy. This chapter discusses the level of informa-
tion literacy observed in Facebook users and describes users’ self-assess-
ments concerning their perceptions of information literacy, as well as how
VI Preface
they represent, appropriate, and create information. Legal, ethical, and
privacy aspects also are considered.
– Chapter 6: Privacy. This chapter investigates users’ privacy behavior after the
data security breach in the United States involving government contractor
Edward Snowden. The author investigates whether users are concerned about
their online privacy and any actions they take to minimize risks of privacy
violations. Additionally, the chapter discusses the “pushback” phenomenon.
– Chapter 7: Death and bereavement. This chapter uses of a corpus-based study
that compares results found in the international literature investigating con-
nections among online elaborations of mourning. It analyzes web-based
community pages that include posts and comments regarding the topic of
death.
– Chapter 8: History. This chapter discusses whether Facebook is a valuable
source for historical science, especially for microhistory or “history from
below.” For such purposes of analysis, informetrics and statistical methods
are applied.
– Chapter 9: Science communication. This chapter analyzes how research
centers and public universities use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to make
their scientific findings publicly available. Three aspects are measured: pres-
ence, connectivity, and intensity.
– Chapter 10: Biased user perceptions. This chapter investigates if constructs
such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) are valid and reliable for
SNSs research. The authors detected a bias on quantitative TAM-like surveys,
the so-called “standard-dependent user blindness” (SDUB). This finding
points out the challenges in gathering unbiased user perceptions on SNSs
markets.
– Chapter 11: Legal. The concluding chapter focuses on social networking
services and the question of whether current European competition law is
sufficient to control these new, rapidly evolving developments for providing
information. Markets for consumer communication services (CCS) as well as
aspects of data privacy are also addressed.
We believe the intended audience for this anthology will consist of social media
researchers, information scientists, social scientists, and, not least, everyone
interested in Facebook-related topics. We imagine readers will bring to their
reading of the text a basic knowledge in the area of SNS research and methodol-
ogy. We hope this book will lead readers toward a better understanding of social
Preface VII
media, and in particular, the myriad facets of Facebook users and their use of the
service.
Katsiaryna S. Baran and Kathrin Knautz
Heinrich Heine University, Department of Information Science
Düsseldorf, Germany
August 2016
Contents
Preface V
Liridona Gashi, Kathrin Knautz
Chapter 1. Unfriending and Becoming Unfriended on Facebook 1
Isabelle Dorsch, Aylin Ilhan
Chapter 2. Photo Publication Behavior of Adolescents on Facebook 45
Sarah Hartmann, Brigitta Wanner
Chapter 3. Does Facebook Cause Addiction? An Analysis
of German Facebook Users 72
Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda, Michele Willson
Chapter 4. Facebook Social Games 94
Tuba Ciftci, Kathrin Knautz
Chapter 5. Information Literacy Levels of Facebook Users 115
Kai Wittig
Chapter 6. Privacy in Social Networks After the Global Surveillance
Disclosures 146
Ágnes Veszelszki, Andrea Parapatics
Chapter 7. From Cooperation to Compassion:
Death and Bereavement on Social Networking Websites 172
Mechtild Stock
Chapter 8. Facebook: A Source for Microhistory? 210
Lourdes López-Pérez, María Dolores Olvera-Lobo
Chapter 9. Social Media as Channels for the Public Communication of Science:
The Case of Spanish Research Centers and Public Universities 241
Katsiaryna S. Baran, Wolfgang G. Stock
Chapter 10. “Blind as a Bat”: Users of Social Networking Services and Their
Biased Quality Estimations in TAM-like Surveys 265
