How does group identity relate to new social media

Last week I wrote about group identity in MMO's, and especially looked at group identity theory, which consist of:
- Cognitive component, which represents person response to his own identity and how he categorizes himself as a part of a group.
- Affective component, which represents the group's attractiveness from the person's viewpoint and the group's ability to help the person to reach his goals.
- Behavioral component, which represents the group's dependancy on each other and it's ability to coordinate activities towards common goal.

All of these could be identified in groups found in MMO's, but can these same categories be applied to other new social media like Facebook?

First let's take a look at the cognitive component. Clearly each person in Facebook has certain idea of their own identity and they represent this with their profile page. They can also feel a part of a group, be it their group of friends or certain groups of people with similar ideas. The way I see it, cognitive component is quite strong in Facebook.

Then what about the affective component? Group's attractiveness is a difficult subject to cover. Could it be measured by the amount of comments a person sends to a group? I won't be going any deeper into that subject, but I think it's something that could be studied more.
Then the other part of affective component, group's ability to help a person to reach his goals. What kinds of personal goals are there in Facebook? Do people aim to befriend a certain individual? Or do they try to gather as many or as few friends as possible? This is a component that I feel Facebook is completely missing, and as such the affective component is not nearly as strong as cognitive component in Facebook.

Lastly the behavioural component. In Facebook, you could say people are dependant on each other, but that's mostly just an emotional connection between the people and not a practical one. Still the dependancy could be quite strong. The groups in Facebook might have a certain common goal, say reach 10000 members for a cause. They usually have a goal, but there's rarely any kind of activities organized to help them reach this goal. This is why I would place the behavioural component below cognitive, although the dependancies can not be ignored.

In conclusion, we can identify certain components which improve group identity in Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on cognitive side, but also people's dependancy on each other is quite strong. Still, when compared to communities in MMO's, I think that Facebook is lagging behind quite a bit. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is anyone's guess.