Abstract

This paper presents a tentative hypothesis on how the communication structure of the social network Facebook is modeled. Data for the analysis are derived from a self-report questionnaire on 1001 Facebook users. We offer some remarks concerning the cognitive, social and motivational mechanisms involved in using the Facebook social network. Moreover, a step is made towards the idea that the topological structure of Facebook friendships is underlined by a scale-free network of the small-world kind. An analysis of the differences between a proper small-world network and the partial network built from the experimental data was performed and some hypotheses on the rationale behind these differences were introduced.