Consequences of Social Networking

I really enjoyed reading this article as I recently did a research project on this subject last semester.  Similar to this study, I wanted to see if a person's personality and body image plays a role in how they use their social network profile.  To refer back to this article, I am not surprised that majority of the students who took the survey had a Facebook profile.  I do believe that a social networking system and real life are completely different and that people display more confidence and openness on sites like Facebook so they don't care as much if they add more friends.... The more friends on Facebook the better you look (o so it seems).  In the real world, people do not have a network of 300 friends.  I really liked how this article broke different factors of social networking use down by gender, anxiety levels, extroversion, etc.  The results concluded that extroversion was the major factor when looking at a person's social networking size.  This does not surprise me since people who are already confident and outgoing in person, probably have the same confidence (if not more confidence) online.  I do believe that sites like Facebook are a great source for those more shy people to branch out and find like minded people.  I also thought it was interesting how the second highest finding for social network size was based on gender.... Us women sure do like to socialize ;)