Adam Acar’s “Antecedents and Consequences of Online Social Networking Behavior: The Case of Facebook” touched on what I believe are some pretty obvious topics. In the article Acar states that online social networks and real life social networks are significantly different in size. And that he believes that real life social networking should be significantly larger than online social networking since real life can include family members and people you actually interact with face-to-face. He also states that this should be the case because OSN’s are usually exclusive to students and those of a younger demographic.
I am not sure what year this article was written, but I am pretty sure his beliefs are slightly outdated. Online Social Networking sites like Myspace.com and Facebook.com are no longer used exclusively, but are now open to the public and being used by both older and younger people.
It seems like more and more often I am hearing friends joke around about how they just received a Facebook friend request from their mom or dad or aunt or uncle OR even grandparent. It’s pretty funny. I took have received such invites, I have even started receiving friend requests from my younger cousins (ages 10 and younger) which makes me question their need to be on Facebook or Myspace in the first place.
I also found it interesting that the article stated that any two strangers can be connected by 6 nodes and that any two members of an OSN can be connected to each other with an average of 4 nodes. This just goes to show you how many more people are starting to use online social networking sites. From grandparents to little brothers or sisters Facebook is taking over the world making the difference in size between real-life social networking and online social networking larger and larger.
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