Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Developing relationships and
meeting interpersonal needs
people she had never met) and keep the “line of
communication open” without frequent and costly
time and emotional investment:
The young people in our study, like Theresa, used
the capabilities of the online social network MyS-
pace.com to develop and maintain various types
of relationships. Contrary to the popular percep-
tion that SNS users falsify their identities making
truthful relationships difficult, Theresa's profile
illustrated her attempts to craft and present an au-
thentic self within the online space. She posted an
actual photograph of herself, listed her hometown
and country, displayed a username that related to
her first name only, truthfully reported her relation-
ship status as single, provided her actual age and
encouraged her “friends” to exchange messages
with her: “Facebook or text me,” now that she was
entering college. However, she also took steps to
protect her full identity from unwanted viewers,
setting her MySpace profile to “private” and al-
lowing only those within her approved network
to see her full profile and contacts. Moreover,
like the other students we interviewed, Theresa,
talked about the advantages of freely expressing
her thoughts, opinions, fears, and emotions through
the multimedia channels SNSs afford but also
noted her hesitancy to reveal too much personal
information, such as her full name, address, and
contact information, which could subject her to
unwanted fraud or abuse.
Walking the line between self-expression
and anonymity, Theresa's profile revealed that
she used various MySpace features to maintain
interpersonal connections with people she saw
everyday as well as with those she rarely saw or
had never met. Features such as the address book,
asynchronous message system, online chat, bulle-
tins, friend requests, event alerts, and automatically
generated, aggregated lists of friend “updates” or
“status and mood” reports allowed her to keep
abreast of the lives of people in her network and
grow it. In her view, MySpace was a virtual “hang
out” where one could relax around other people
(e.g., close friends, distant friends, acquaintances,
I think it's a good way to keep in touch with
people you may not have time to call or meet or
even text them…it's kind of a “kick-back”…it's
just kind of a way to relax and hang out and not
necessarily having to worry about talking directly
to a person but just kind of like keeping that line
of communication open.
However, Theresa also noted that a core group
of “friends” in her MySpace network were actu-
ally people she talked to and physically hung out
with regularly. She felt that her connections to
those people, especially, deepened with her use
of MySpace because she was able to “see more
sides to them” than she would have otherwise
as they could now express themselves in audio,
video, graphical, and text media. For instance,
friends she never knew had political interests
or artistic abilities were displaying these sides
of themselves in MySpace. Friends who were
not usually emotional in person were revealing
emotions through emoticons, descriptive status
updates, or online writing.
Maintaining this range of social connections
from which to draw—e.g.,“strong ties” as among
family members and close friends and “weak
ties” as among acquaintances, distant friends and
potential contacts (Granovetter, 1973)— makes
SNSs potentially advantageous to young people
who are able to activate connections appropriate
to their purposes when they need them. For in-
stance, one “friend” in Theresa's network, a former
classmate now at a distant university, activated his
network to build an audience for his budding radio
career. Using the “bulletin” feature in MySpace,
he posted the following message titled “New
Information,” which asked his contacts to check
out a new radio show:
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