Connecting and being connected: investigating friending practices across multiple social networking sites
Information Technology & People
ISSN: 0959-3845
Article publication date: 11 May 2021
Issue publication date: 1 April 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Social networking sites (SNSs) offer people the possibility of maintaining larger networks of social ties, which also entails more complex relationship maintenance across multiple platforms. Whom to “friend” and via which platform can involve complex deliberations. This study investigates the relationships between users' perceived friending affordances of five popular SNSs (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn) and their friending behaviors concerning strong ties, weak ties (existing and latent ties) and parasocial ties.
Design/methodology/approach
An online survey using Qualtrics was provided to participants (N = 626) through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The survey asked their SNS use and their friending behaviors with different ties on each of the sites.
Findings
Users' friending decisions are dependent on an interplay of socio-technical affordances of each SNS and specific needs for the ties. The authors found that the affordances of bridging social capital and enjoyment are aligned with friending weak and parasocial ties, respectively. The affordances of bonding social capital were not valued to friend strong ties.
Originality/value
The study extends the affordance and social capital literature by assessing users' perceived, contextualized SNS affordances in relation to actual communication behaviors in friending different social ties. This approach provides contextualized insights to friending decisions and practices on SNSs.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by the Department of Telecommunication at the University of Florida and the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST 109‐2221‐E‐003‐010‐MY3).
Citation
Yuan, C.W. and Lee, Y.-H. (2022), "Connecting and being connected: investigating friending practices across multiple social networking sites", Information Technology & People, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 1096-1115. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-07-2020-0486
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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