For most people, Facebook is just a tool — an application they use to connect with old friends and dig up dirt on new ones.But Facebook is more than just an application — it’s a social structure.Within this structure, the things we say take on different meanings. This can lead to a series of miscommunications that often result in what I like to call “Facebook status rage.”Facebook status rage is what happens when someone takes another person’s Facebook status personally and decides to let it all out, often via another Facebook status update.  For a hypothetical example, my imaginary friend Mark likes to frequently post lyrics to his favorite Spin Doctors songs.I’ve been sitting at my computer reading these updates for a few days now, and I’m getting tired of them. Instead of just ignoring them, I decide to fight back.My response status “I think it’s really lame when people post the same lyrics over and over again,” is posted, and I feel better about myself.But Mark may not even read that status and, most importantly, may not understand the status relates to him because meaning is contextual and depends heavily upon the social situation.The things we say mean different things in different social contexts.People often use the information gathered from locations, previous conversations and a myriad of other psychological tools to determine what the things we say actually mean.But in situations in which the context is missing or foreign, individuals are often left with only their personal information as a means of understanding.Reading Mark’s hypothetical status updates triggered something within me.But my response didn’t take into account the context in which Mark was posting, specifically that the status was posted on Facebook.I used the information gathered in my own context to react to something on Facebook.This situation can be confusing because Facebook is a strange new animal that merges social situations and can create an unclear sense of context.Facebook has this effect because of its stature as a social structure, which comes about as a side effect of the site’s enormous population.Facebook had limited and few social consequences early in its existence.Early adopters of the network spent a majority of their time existing in the real world because there weren’t enough other Facebook members to really form extensive social networks.Within a few years though, Facebook became incredibly popular. This success created an easily observed ubiquity among college-aged students.One must only walk through any University computer lab to see several students on Facebook talking to friends, viewing pictures or looking at their friends’ profiles.Facebook has seen a recent flood of older and less computer-savvy users also as a result of an expansion of the site’s ubiquity.Facebook has become a social structure. Many people have invested time in it, and it began to matter to them.As more people joined the service, more people’s real-life social networks also became a part of the site.This further increases people’s desire to spend time on the service, and slowly their social networks begin to merge.As these social networks began to merge together, the line between Facebook and real-life starts to become a little bit blurry. That blur also extends past the silly concept of Facebook status rage and into other aspects of people’s social world.Most people don’t really want to take into account the effect that social networking sites have on their daily existence.It’s hard for many people to lend credence to a Web site actually manipulating the events of their lives and those of people around them.But most people also don’t think about how much time they spend cruising Facebook.Researchers are just starting to take notice of how powerful the Internet, and social networking sites in particular, are.Their papers and projects that poke and prod users will take at least a few months to be published, but their studies will only serve to empirically prove the information analytical users have already figured out — things like facebook matter in people’s lives.Skylar Gremillion is a 26-year-old sociology graduate student from Plaucheville.—–Contact Skylar Gremillion at [email protected]