Attitudes and habits concerning status updates on Facebook

A common form of communication within Facebook is the communication between users via status updates. If you write a status update all your friends have the opportunity to read and to respond to the update. The overall issue of this survey is: how are Facebook users to commu- nicate with status updates? The survey aims to gain insight and greater understanding of communication patterns and user awareness of social contexts when they write status updates. The study will act as an attempt to understand a small part of a complex interaction taking place in a social situation. The method used is a quantitative survey of a sample from a random population of Swedish Facebook users. As a theoretical basis is the sociologist Erving Goffman theories about interactions between people. The results of the survey show that most users do not restrict their social context through the withholding of friend requests or preferences for who can access status updates. It was also possible to see difference in the social context of those users who had unusual status update behavior against the social con- text in which the average user had. Overall, respondents give more feedback on other people's status updates than they write their own. To send a private message or to use the chat was the least used channels of communication. Users more often choose to communicate through a communication channel that is accessible for the other users to read and comment