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Facebook interests don’t influence other users, study claims
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By Tori Floyd | The Right Click
If you're one of the many social media users who carefully selects which bands or books show up in their profiles in the interest of spreading your good taste, you might be disappointed by this new study.
Researchers at Harvard recently found that social networks don't actually have a dramatic impact on shaping user tastes and interests. Obviously sharing content will have some effect on the people you share it with, but it's a much more subtle process than you might think.
The study, which looked at the Facebook activity of college students over a four year period, found students that "share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another," according to the study's abstract. It also states there was little evidence tastes were diffused amongst groups of Facebook friends, with one notable exception: classical and jazz music.
One TechCrunch blogger, however, says that he thinks the study is not without its flaws. Devin Coldewey points out: "pulling useful data from social networks is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle," and suggests the findings might be more consequential than they are substantive.
He goes on to explain why tracking interests via Facebook can be a faulty endeavour:
"Putting Wilco in your favorites is a different act from liking Wilco's Facebook page, their official band site, or posting their latest video," said Coldewey in the article. "Gauging someone's interest in a movie or band by the favorites factor alone is inadequate. Their findings are essentially that taste doesn't diffuse the way you might expect. But while the data support this, nothing supports the data."
Coldeway does have a point: what I listed as an interest when I first created my profile is completely different from what I share with friends through videos and links. There's no better example of this than Facebook's new Timeline feature. Now, users can go back to see what they were sharing years ago, and many of us might be disappointed in what their 2007-selves were listening to or watching on TV.
Yet even with its flaws, the study is still an interesting change from what marketing execs have likely been relying on to get the attention of their audience. One person's love of the Foo Fighters does not translate into concert ticket sales from their friends.
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