What Facebook Knows About Our Relationships...

It isn’t a shock that Facebook knows a lot about our lives and our habits. Just take one gander at the targeted ads on the side of your Facebook page and you’ll see trends in your behavior. It is also no shock that Facebook has become a dominant social medium for sharing statuses, pictures, babies, wedding rings, and the like. It follows logic, then, that Facebook would not only know about our lives and behaviors, but also our relationship with others. We touched a bit on this in class, when discussing nonverbal communication. Of particular interest to me was the Le Pagne of the women of Cote d’Ivoire, specifically the fabrics used to nonverbally communicate information about their romantic relationships. And as it turns out, without saying a word, we similarly demonstrate certain behaviors on Facebook around our relationships. There is a very interesting Buzzfeed article about what Facebook knows about our love lives. A few of these include: (1) The first 12 months are crucial to determining whether a relationship will last; (2) People post more on Facebook in the months before a relationship, and then get quieter after they are in a relationship; (3) Once relationships start, people post more happy posts; and (4) Facebook users’ friends interact with them more following a break up. For specifics, please visit the article. 

This is quite a bit of information about our relations with others, all from how we socially interact through Facebook posts – a common way to project many aspects (or all for some) of our lives. In what sense is this similar nonverbal communication projected through the La Pagne in Cote d’Iviore, and in what ways is it different?