Popular social media and networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly changed the way we communicate. What many don’t realize is that all those status posts and “likes” and “dislikes” are flooding the Internet with data; usable, searchable, baffling data. According to a recent article in Slate, over 500 million users are accessing Facebook and each of those users is creating an average of 90 pieces of content a month. Slate details how others have decided to utilize this data to examine various trends:
Our first stop is Openbook. The site lets you search public Facebook updates and was created to demonstrate how FB’s privacy settings are confusing: People don’t realize how widely they are sharing personal information. And, indeed, when you do a search like “cheated on my wife,” you discover updates that would’ve been better left in the privacy of one’s own mind. Same with “my boss sucks.”
From a research standpoint, however, this kind of commentary can be tapped for more useful purposes:
It would be helpful for transportation planners to know the places where people complain the most about traffic. Educators could see the data and sentiment analysis around how a community feels about its local schools.
Facebook’s own data team sifts through their own information searching for trends. One trend they’ve already analyzed is the times of year their users seem to be the happiest. Using the language of their user’s posts, researchers determined that Americans tend to be happiest on Thanksgiving Day – Mother’s day is a distant second.
There’s much more to be gleaned through the analysis of Facebook data; and much of this data will provide a treasure tr to future researchers. It would be useful, for example, to analyze the writing level of Facebook’s many users utilizing a metric like The Lexile Framework for Writing, to gauge how the semantic and syntactic ability of writers increase over time. It might also be useful to assess the writing level of students, in a particular region or area, when writing informally as contrasted with their more formal writing attempts. Whatever we find in the data, it would certainly be interesting to assess student’s dominant mode of writing in non-assessment situations.