Motivation and Content Creation in Online Social Networks
Authors: Amanda Porter, Stephen Butler, Kate Starbird, Zac Taschdjian
Abstract:
There have been papers published on social networking sites, but there are relatively few that address the issues of motivation and social benefit through participation. We explore the literature and theoretical underpinnings on the motivations to join and contribute content to social networking sites. In addition, an online survey of two popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace showed a correlation between the motivations of community members regarding social capital, communication, and identity formation. Our findings support and further previous research on social networking, and points to the need to expand research to include other user motivations and other social networks.
Keywords:
social networking, social capital, online communication, motivation, computermediated communication
Statement of the Problem:
We framed our initial problem as investigating the motivations for contributing to online social and educational environments. We initially considered communities like Facebook, MySpace, LearnHub, Friendster, and several Open Source Software projects. As the project progressed we Fischer/Eden 14 DCNM Course, Spring 2009 narrowed our scope to focus exclusively on social networking sites, specifically Facebook, MySpace and. We also modified our goals to include determining motivations for content creation as well as participation. The questions we sought to address were, Why do individuals join these social networking sites? Why do they spend their time and energy creating and posting content for others to see? Our attempts to answers these questions increased our understanding and insight into the growing trend of digital and social systems.
Rationale:
Social networking (SN) sites have become indispensable in the lives of young people and are becoming increasingly important to people of all ages. The sites are designed for various types of communication among community members, whether they are friends, family, or relative strangers. Due to their ubiquity, especially among young people, academia has been interested in exploring the motivations behind their adoption and the impact these new communication channels are having throughout society. Why, for example, is MySpace losing members while Facebook grows? Though many papers have been published on the larger topic of social networking use, we found relatively few that addressed the issues of motivation and social benefit (or detriment) through participation. The best sources for related research are Ellison and Lampe who are continuing to produce research on the nature of SN usage and how it is changing over time. Additional rationale is contained in each section discussing our findings
