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SALT LAKE CITY — If you think mundane Facebook posts about how much you love Diet Coke or Tweets about how excited you are for the weekend don't have much significance in the grand scheme of human existence, think again.
Researchers and scientists are paying close attention to what you say on your social networking sites, and they're coming up with interesting findings.
Most recently, a group of scientists from Cornell University found that people's moods vary with work, sleep and length of day — and they discovered this by tracking Twitter feeds all over the world. Read about the study HERE on ksl.com.
Another group of researchers tracked a more serious trend: alcohol abuse. In an article for TIME magazine, Bonnie Rochman wrote, "The next time some blustery college kid boasts on Facebook about how wasted he was last night, don't just roll your eyes. He may be telegraphing he's got a drinking problem." Read the entire article HERE.
One study suggests it's the social media feeds themselves that are causing emotional problems. CNN reports that, according to researchers at the University of Southern California, "Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say." Read the CNN story HERE.
Not all habits of social media users are problematic or mundane. Techdirt reported that, although companies love to bemoan the time wasted by employees surfing social media sites like Facebook and YouTube, several studies have found that those employees are actually more productive. Read all about it HERE.
And if this alone hasn't given the scientific community enough to think about, there's a new online haven: ResearchGATE, a sort of Facebook especially for scientists. "Often, researchers work in a vacuum. They can be stuck on a problem blocking progress on their research that someone on the other side of the world has already solved," wrote Robert Mullins in an article for VentureBeat. "Yes, there's a wealth of information online and in scientific journals, but what if there were one central place online where a researcher could ask a question and someone else could answer it?" Read the full article HERE.
Email: lmaxfield@ksl.com
