Over the summer, I removed the Facebook app from my iPhone out of fear that Facebook was hindering my productivity. However, during the few minutes I spend on Facebook per day, I check my notifications, read my messages, and scroll through my newsfeed. This is a glimpse of what my newsfeed looks like right now: a slew of news articles, some advertisements, a cute video of someone's kid, and a handful of status updates – some are witty observations, and others are life updates. Before I read Mehdizadeh's article, I spent a little bit of time thinking about how Facebook enables people to present themselves however they want to present themselves, and more than a few times, I rolled my eyes at what I considered parades of self-centeredness. Reading this article helps me understand the various means that people use to promote themselves on Facebook, including their pictures, personal information, notes, and status updates. Facebook grants people the opportunity to unleash themselves with little effort, so I find it unsurprising that narcissism and low self-esteem have a significant relationship with Facebook usage and self-promotion.
One strength of this research paper is the vast number of sources (eighteen of them), and I notice that most of the sources were published in the past decade. I also appreciate that the author did not claim that narcissism necessarily causes more Facebook activity, which is a common misconception about observational studies like this one. The paper mentions the limitations of the study, which include the subjective observation of the participants' Facebook pages. Additionally, I think that the scope of the study is weak, and future studies should include more participants at more universities. The three graphs look clean, and they help me visualize the differences between male and female behavior on Facebook, but the numbers on the graphs have little meaning to me. Generally, I like to see more graphs in research papers, especially with more objective measurements.
There is a dearth of research on identity production in "nonymous" (the opposite of anonymous) online environments like Facebook, and this study helps fill that void. One of the main purposes of this research article is to call for more research – more objectivity, larger sample sizes, and more settings – which I think has value on its own. Also, according to the paper, one concrete area that this study impacts is online marketing. Understanding relationships between self-esteem and Facebook usage is a goldmine for companies selling products meant to boost confidence. Overall, I think that this paper makes a significant point about the importance of understanding the connection between people's online and offline identities.
Reading this research article provides a good example of how a technical paper can be organized: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions. In technical papers that I write in the future, I will consider utilizing tables and graphs in the same way that this paper does. These visualizations make the key results easy to understand, and the text adds commentary that helps interpret these results. In addition, this paper reveals the importance of conceding the limitations of studies. In this case, the subjectivity and small sample size in the study serve as motivations to expand on the results, and I hope that the technical papers that I write will also spur further research.
