Examining Entitativity on Facebook

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Anita Blanchard, whose interest is in entitativity on Facebook: the feeling of the ‘groupiness’ of specific groups. Such entitativity emerges from the presence of clear group boundaries, internal homogeneity between members, social interaction in the group, a clear group structure, and shared common goals held by all members. Such entitativity is a necessary precursor to key group processes and outcomes, such as a common group identity.

So, what is the level of entitativity on Facebook? How groupy can it be? There are a range of obvious groupings here: each member and their circle of friends, communicative groups as constituted in a fluid and ephemeral fashion through status updates, likes and comments, as well as formal interest and fan groups, of course.

This can be measured, for example through examining activity, interactivity, similarity, and the continuity of commenting processes (are the same few people always commenting); together, they measure the entitativity of status updates and generate a group identity; this may also overlap with existing group identities outside of Facebook of course.

Anita’s study examined some 378 users, with an average age of 29 and 70% female; of these, participants were asked to look at their last Facebook update to see if it had two or more responses (over 200 had). Activity was divided into a number of different types (were comments on topic, was there discussion, how many commenters were there) in the end.

On topic comments and the continuity of commenters were directly related to overall group identity; interactivity and the continuity of commenters were also specifically related to status update entitativity; groups outside of Facebook related to interactivity and similarity.

Entitativity on Facebook is related to the perceived interactivity between commenters, then, but not to actual interactivity (comments, interactions), as well as to the history of commenters interacting with one another. Group identity is related to entitativity, and to coherent discussion amongst an ongoing group of people. Maybe group theories are useful for Facebook, then – it appears to be mainly that repetitions of group interaction make Facebook groupy for some people.