Is Facebook More Memorable Than Faces?

The quick updates that most of us post on Facebook throughout the day are usually meant to share a funny story or let our friends know what we are up to. But be careful what you post. New research has found that it's those little passages that we read during our social networking sessions that tend to stick with us longer than nearly anything else we see or read.

The study, a combined effort by scientists at the University of California San Diego and the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, showed that Facebook statuses and posts are more memorable than other sentences or people's faces.1 Sadly, they were remembered one and a half times better than sentences in published books and two and a half times better than people's faces. Is that significant? According to the researchers, that difference is roughly equivalent to the gap between someone with normal memory function versus someone with amnesia.

The subjects were 280 undergraduate students at the University of California San Diego. The participants were subject to several kinds of memory testing, measuring not only their recall ability, but how certain they felt about their recall. The participants were split into two groups and shown either 100 sentences posted on Facebook or 100 sentences that appeared in books. All of the sentences in both categories were relatively short, with the longest running 25 words, and the Facebook statuses actually averaged a few words longer than the book sentences. >

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• Facebook’s Effects on Self-Esteem


• Facebook Friends Cause Stress

Muslims and the media in the blogosphere

Daniel Martin Varisco, Muslims and the media in the blogosphere, Contemporary Islam (2010) 4:157-177. DOI 10.1007/s11562-009-0106-y

Abstract

In the past two decades a virtual Ummah has evolved in cyberspace. While some of these websites are targeted specifically at Muslims, others attempt to provide outreach on Islam or counter Islamophobic bias. As noted by Jon Anderson, in his pioneering work on Islam in cyberspace, Muslims were among the first engineering students to create websites at the dawn of the Internet, before mainstream Islamic organizations posted official websites. There is a wealth of material by Muslims in English and Western languages, some of it archived for research. This article explores the methodological problems posed in studying the range of Islam-content blogs, from private individuals to religious scholars, as well as Muslim websites that feature comments from readers. The focus of the paper is an analysis of blogs about Islam or by Muslims that either act as watchdogs on the media or try to provide alternative views to the mainstream media of competing Muslim groups. Researching these blogs as a form of e-ethnography calls for a rethinking and refining of anthropological methodology as e-ethnography.

Keywords : Internet, Muslim blogs, Islamophobia, Ethnography

Internet Gratifications and Internet Addiction: On the Uses and Abusesof New Media

• Indeok Song, Robert Larose, Matthew S. Eastin and Carolyn A. Lin. Internet Gratifications and Internet Addiction: On the Uses and Abuses of New Media, CyberPsychology & Behavior. August 2004, 7(4): 384-394. doi:10.1089/cpb.2004.7.384. http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2004.7.384

Abstract
Internet addiction has been identified as a pathological behavior, but its symptoms may be found in normal populations, placing it within the scope of conventional theories of media attendance. The present study drew upon fresh conceptualizations of gratifications specific to the Internet to uncover seven gratification factors: Virtual Community, Information Seeking, Aesthetic Experience, Monetary Compensation, Diversion, Personal Status, and Relationship Maintenance. With no parallel in prior research, Virtual Community might be termed a "new" gratification. Virtual Community, Monetary Compensation, Diversion, and Personal Status gratifications accounted for 28% of the variance in Internet Addiction Tendency. The relationship between Internet addiction and gratifications was discussed in terms of the formation of media habits and the distinction between content and process gratifications.