I stumbled upon a pretty cool feature on facebook's redesign a few days ago, stats for categories such as music and movies for networks. If you're a facebook user and wanna check out what I'm seeing click on Networks, scroll down and you should see a "Network Statistics" section on the right side. If you're not a facebook user, check out the pics below:
University of Massachusetts at Amherst Network Stats:
No suprises here, Sublime and Family Guy top their respective charts, half the school is apparently not interested (or at least not affiliated) in politics, maybe that has something to do with the fact that a 1/3 of the campus is single and on the prowl?
Northeastern University Network Stats:
Northeastern has some similarities with Umass, a lot actually. 1/3 of the campus is single and 1/2 are not affiliated with a political view, the top TV show is Family Guy and the top book, like Umass is Harry Potter.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Network Stats:
Hey, here's something interesting, UNC has only 1% less students who call themselves "liberal" (18%) than Northeastern and Umass (both at 19%)! Harry Potter once again tops the books list, but the Bible (something not on either of the other two networks) comes in at #2! facebook also backs up the popular claim that there are more girls than boys at the campus (46% female to 35% male).
In general, all three campuses have pretty much the same interests even though they have slightly different demographics. There's some grumblings on the Northeastern network page about the "masculinity" of their campus due to Jack Johnson being the #1 musical artist but at least they don't have Coldplay topping their charts like UNC! Sorry Coldplay fans, no me gusta...and of course Ben Folds joins the top ten list (they are from Chapel Hill), and the Fray make it into UNC's top ten list.
University of Southern California Network Stats:
From my personal experience at USC, the campus was a great source of new music and movies as many of the students had connections within the music industry either through friends in bands, or internship experience and of course the USC Film School is one of the best such programs in the country so I was expecting for USC's musical and cinematic preferences to be different from other schools, yet the facebook network stats doesn't back up this hypothesis. There are some slight differences, for instance USC has Gladiator and Zoolander in it's top ten movies and John Mayer in it's top ten music list, but other than those two slight differences, USC students like the same things UNC, Umass, and Northeastern students like. Not a very groundbreaking statement there, considering how students from everywhere attend schools everywhere and we're all so connected it's tough not to watch the same movies and listen to the same songs.
Let's see if these stats change any for the City of Boston network:
Aaargh, Coldplay at #1 again. Other than Rap and R&B making their way into the top ten list, there's not much of a difference between the Boston network page and the four colleges we've looked at. Looking at a few of the other cities across the country generally leads to the same results. There are differences in musical tastes between say Cincinatti, Ohio and Boston, Massachusetts but not a huge difference. What does this conformity say about our society? Are we all really that similar?
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Post written on 2007-04-22.
