Facebook status updates are often lambasted as banal, pointless, overshares or other forms of looked down upon minutiae, but it turns out scientifically … they’re an incredibly “sticky” form of human interaction.
Facebook status updates may be most directly associated with information no one necessarily wants — where you’re bored waiting on line, your lunch liveblogged or a funny picture you may have seen already — but they’re also measurably memorable.
A new study of Facebook status updates and their impact on readers has revealed that we are one and a half times more likely to remember a Facebook status update than any other kind of communication between humans in written form. Notes, tweets, Instagram comments — all pale next to the super sticky Facebook status update.
The Facebook status update study was undertaken at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Warwick, and researchers discovered the curious impact of the minor blips transmitted through the reigning social network.
What Facebook status updates lack in substance, they make up for in staying power, and in spades — Fast Company quotes a researcher:
” ‘It’s not that you can remember the Facebook posts a little better–you can remember them a lot better,’ says study co-author Dr. Laura Mickes, who calls the findings ‘jaw-dropping.’ “
The site adds:
“Consider this. The gaps in performance between Facebook recall and literature recall are on a scale similar to the difference between amnesiacs and people with healthy memory. To clarify, Dr. Mickes isn’t talking about the TV amnesiac who wakes up from a bump on the head and can’t remember his wife; she means the guy who can’t generate any new memories, not even the conversation he had five minutes ago.”
Further study on Facebook status updates and the why of their stickiness is planned, but it’s something to bear in mind the next time you answer the call of “what’s on your mind?”
0 Comments