What is Facebook?

Apologies if this post gets technical, or wordy, but it's something I thought would be interesting for my blog post about social media this week. I would also like to say that I am by no means even close to an expert on any of these topics, and what I'm working on in regards to this is still heavily in the process of being researched, so nothing pertaining to the in-depth knowledge is certain.

Anyway, the title of this post is one of the questions that my adviser, Shane Tilton, and I asked ourselves when I walked into his office one day last spring semester. Shane was working on a research project that he had picked up about agenda setting in regards to Facebook, and what exactly influences what users of Facebook see on their timeline whenever they use it. This is actually the research project I was referring to in my "All of the Writing" post.

But, I took notice of a picture he had drawn on his whiteboard, and mentioned it to him. This led to Shane explaining his project to me and what it was about. The drawing was a model on how content is consumed and seen on Facebook. Most of it went right over my head, because it was something I had never really thought about or even really considered. To sum up that conversation, it was basically him telling me his thoughts on how content is interacted with on Facebook (likes, shares, comments, etc.) and how that affects what people see on their timelines. There was a large blank spot on his diagram though and that ended up being the Facebook algorithm, or the thing that basically decides what is seen or not seen on Facebook. It was the missing piece of this huge model that we later ended up refining and changing quite a bit.

What was really amazing about this situation though, was after talking with him about the model and discussing what was going on, he asked me if I wanted to pick up the project and see what I can do with it. So, of course I accepted, not wanting to lose this opportunity.

I ended up spending the majority of that semester just trying to figure out what a lot of the theories that made up our model were. The most important two are Agenda Setting Theory and Actor Network Theory. An extremely simplified version of Actor Network Theory is that it is basically everything, including inanimate objects for example, the Facebook algorithm, are all part of a giant network that reacts to every interaction that occurs throughout the network. The bulk of the project, Agenda Setting Theory, is not necessarily referring to setting a certain personal agenda in Facebook, but is instead talking about how content creators effect the salience, or how visible a certain topic, issue, type of content, etc. is on the platform, and also discusses the things that can influence this salience. Traditionally speaking, Agenda Setting Theory has only really been applied to conventional mediums, like television and newspapers, so applying it to social media was a weird jump to make.

But, even just the base theory wasn't enough to really get a clear picture of what was going on, so we had to add in the reverse of Agenda Setting Theory, which is aptly named, Reverse Agenda Setting Theory. And this is really the point where literally nothing is certain with the theory, because it's not a heavily researched theory in traditional mediums let alone social media. The idea behind Reverse Agenda Setting is that instead of the content creators influencing the salience, it's actually the audience or in this case, the users that influence it.

I guess if there is a point to this post, it's that social media is a sometimes overwhelmingly complex beast that has yet to be tamed, or really fully understood from a perspective of users and content creators. It's very easy to understand the Facebook algorithm and other social media algorithms and how they work, when you're the company that creates, maintains, and changes them, but when you look in from the outside everything is very muddled and doesn't always make sense on the surface, so you have to look deeper.

If you made it this far without getting bored of my very long-winded post, congratulations! This post ended up being really long and it is something that I'm very interested in, so I wanted to make sure I gave it the length I feel it deserves. I also want to thank Shane for giving me the project, because it's something I'm truly passionate about. I'm always able to write more about this so, if anyone has any questions about the topic, or anything related to the post, I'd be happy to try and answer them.