A recent study entitled “Facebook News Feed: Information or Noise” conducted by Pace’s Dr. Catherine Dwyer in collaboration with Harshada Shrivastav, Regina Collins, and Starr Hiltz of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, finds that Facebook’s news feed can lead to information overload.
“The results of this study indicate that the new design of Facebook’s News Feed has increased the flow of incoming information and that users are often overwhelmed with all of the information presented to them,” Dr. Dwyer and her fellow researchers concluded.
The study surveyed 117 Facebook users. Over half were graduate students, 32 percent were undergraduate students, and 17 percent were non-academics. Dr. Dwyer and her colleagues found that users who revisited Facebook more often increased risk of information overload.
“The results suggest a significant relationship between the frequency of users’ visits and perceptions of Facebook information overload. Highly active users are more at risk of having to process large amounts of information, making them more vulnerable to information overload on Facebook,” the researchers said. “If a user has been away for a week it provides a summary of posts; if the user visits Facebook every hour, it provides the most recent stories. These changes have resulted in a constant stream of information on the News Feed, generated through posts shared not only by friends but also through the posts shared by friends of friends…because of these profuse unstructured posts, many Facebook users are overwhelmed and frustrated with the large amount of information, experiencing the problem of information overload.”
In 2008, Dwyer wrote her PhD. dissertation on privacy management on Facebook. In the study, Dwyer and her colleagues used data that she had collected for a separate study, “Do I know What You Can See? Social Networking Sites and Privacy Management.”
“Basically we had data collected about Facebook privacy management in 2007, and compared the results to a new survey from late 2011,” said Dwyer. “We found that the subjects were much more likely to report they had adjusted their privacy settings in the more recent survey.”
The study also found that gender also played a role. 64.6 percent of woman said they felt overwhelmed by the redesigned Facebook operating system whereas only 39.7 percent of men said the same.
“In particular, gender has a significant effect on perceptions of information overload; females on Facebook experience a greater perception of information overload than males,” the researchers say. “Results reveal that females experience more Facebook information overload than males.”
However, Dr. Dwyer later told Information Week that this result may be skewed by the study’s small sample size. More men than woman were surveyed, and, therefore, the percentages are misleading.
Overall, Dr. Dwyer and her colleagues found that Facebook’s new design was hardly an improvement.
“The results also imply that the redesign of Facebook’s News Feed has widened its focus by including updates from friends of friends, thereby generating enormous amounts of information. A regular user is forced to rummage through huge amounts of incoming information to find relevant posts,” they wrote. “These findings have implications for the design of user interfaces that could address perceptions of information overload on the Facebook News Feed.”