CAN TWO PEOPLE REALLY BE LIKE TWO PEAS IN A POD?

Connecting on Social Media

Do you ever wonder why we feel so connected when we are on social media sites?

I know I do so I took a look around and found some factors that can explain why

we feel this connection.

• A computer is much easier to interact with than someone face to face because it does not require cognitive or emotional involvement. (Liraz Margalit Ph.D.)

I will explain what I mean by that, when we are interacting with people face to face we are doing

this with nonverbal communication. Meaning we are continuously processing wordless signals like

facial expressions, tone of voice, body language and eye contact. These signals are typically the heart

and soul of the interaction. You can tell by these signals if the person is sad, depressed or even if they

are interested in what you are saying at all. These signals demand cognitive and emotional effort. On

the computer you are not watching for wordless signals, the most you get online is emoticons or a

punctuation. It’s easier to hide your emotions behind a Facebook post or an email. So to sum it up it

takes less effort and it seems to be so much easier to communicate with others online.

Homophily and Social Media:

The principle of Homophily is that people will communicate and associate with those that

have the same likes and dislikes as each other. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Nichomachean ethics, he

noted that people “love those who are like themselves”. (Aristotle 1934, p 1371) This happens daily

on social media platforms. People who have the same likes will begin to communicate on social media

and when they do that it creates networks, networks of friends that all have something in common.

People will start liking your posts and typically this will start a conversation which other’s will like or

dislike and before you know it there is a whole network of people communicating on social media!

Platform Algorithm

On January 11, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be changing it’s News

Feed algorithm to prioritize content from “family, friends and groups”. (Facebook) The purpose of

this was to have less public content like posts from businesses, brands and media and have more

people connecting and communicating with each other. They way they do this is by using four factors

• Inventory- this is the total stock of all the content that is displayed on a user’s
• Facebook’s news feed.
• Signals-this is all the information that Facebook can gather about content.
• Predictions-this is when Facebook predicts how likely you are to have a positive
• reaction to content.
• Score-this is the final number assigned to a piece of content

Facebook wants it users to have meaningful interactions with each other and has begun this

algorithm to do just that. The things you and your friends like will end up in your news feed a the

top and this will hopefully spark these users to interact instead of being inundated with ads from

businesses and marketers.

References

Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks; McPherson; Lynn Smith-Lovin; James M Cook Annual Review of Sociology, 01/2001, Volume 27, Issue 1

How the Facebook algorithm works and how to make it work

for you; retrieved from:https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/

The Facebook Algorithm, How it works and how to master it, posted by Greg Swanson on August 29,2018 in Facebook; retrieved from: https://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2018/08/facebook-algorithm/

The Psychology behind social media interactions: Margalit Ph.D;

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavior/201408/the-psychology-behind

-social-media-interactions