Facebook: a Blessing for Science?
Facebook just launched a new initiative called Facebook for Peace. This is a project linked to a Stanford University research study from the Persuasive Technology Lab that aims to “create insight into how computing products – from websites to mobile phone software – can be designed to influence people”. Here are their words about it: “Many are pessimistic about peace, but our Stanford team sees a different trend. Today many good things are happening. To highlight work that increases peace, we organized “Peace Dot” and invited some partners to join us for the alpha launch in October 2009. The Peace Dot idea is simple: Orgs set up a subdomain at http://peace.[DomainName].com”.
As it sounds like a useful use of Facebook, this is not the first time that the network set up such a thing as they already have created the Gross National Happiness Index for the US. Of course they are two different projects, but they both underlined something: as the network gather more than 370 million people worldwide, it has become a huge database of what people do and think, how to react to events and communicate with their friends. And everything, in real time. This has become a goldmine for researchers. Of course Facebook is not exactly a public garden and this is better for everyone that all these information are private. But if Facebook opens up to advertisers, why not to science?
Imagine if, as an example, people leading behavioural or communication studies could use – with their agreement of course- a sample of people to analyze friendships, tribes’ formation, mobs phenomenon on the internet, etc. This would be really helpful and less costly that any experience they could undertake in a lab. Maybe social networks would perhaps help us to better understand how humans work (even after all these centuries we have not understood everything yet) and make a even more useful contribution to society. It seems that at the end, social media could, to some extent, bring social change.
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