Onomastics on Facebook

from article "Resources, media, networks and future of onomastic studies" (Twitter Part 1)

One of the objectives of my blog e-Onomastics, is to argue that social media may enhance onomastic networking. It is actually obvious that the online discussions can lead to tangible, real-world social interactions. It is deemed necessary for onomasticians to engage with the public online, and during last years, researchers have seen increasing calls to maintain contacts with both the non-scientific public and scholars from other disciplines, especially by means of social media.

Let us go through the main media resources. And today we move on with Facebook.

This is the evident fact that an increasing proportion of the public get their news through social media, especially through Facebook. A new political and cultural climate, in which the dissemination of “fake news” and “alternate facts” on Facebook rose considerably, has not touched on the onomastics yet. Besides that, Facebook represents a very promising outreach platform if you consider how many persons use it: as of the third quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.07 billion monthly active users or more than a quarter of the world’s population (STATISTA 2017).

The main important advantage is the networks that individuals form on the platform: a medial adult user connects with 338 friends. Although the numbers of likes, shares and comments may not be considered as the productive metrics to estimate impact of scientific posts, they may show tendencies to new perspectives. Onomasticians should note that while Facebook usage is high in both total numbers and frequency of usage, many users only passively consume rather than actively participate in discourse (McCLAIN 2017). Facebook, in terms of awareness, only falls behind research profiling sites such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and LinkedIn for scientists and engineers (VAN NOORDEN 2014).

Despite the fact that groups/communities and pages have major differences from a communicative perspective, above you find the top 24 list of onomastic Facebook groups, communities or pages put together in descending order of members, followers or friends.