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This study investigated how college students’ pace of life and perceptions of communication technologies shape the choices they make when engaging in mediated communication with their parents.

We conducted 21 interviews to explore how students’ understandings of various communication technologies, the rules and patterns of technology use in their families, and the circumstances surrounding their use of technologies while at college influence the number and type of media they use to communicate with their parents.

We found that perceived busyness and generational differences played a large role in limiting technologies used, with environmental factors, the purpose of communication, and complexity of message also contributing to technology choices.

This study extends media multiplexity theory by investigating media choice and relational tie strength in an intergenerational context.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to explore how working remotely might impact the superior–subordinate relationship. Specifically, this study examines how immediacy explains articulated dissent, considers how an individual’s attitudes toward online communication predicts immediacy and articulated dissent and compares these relationships in England, Australia and the USA.

Three nations were examined: Australia, England and the USA (n = 1,776). Surveys included demographic questions and the following measures: organizational dissent scale, perceived immediacy measure, computer-mediated immediate behaviors measure and measure of online communication attitude.

The results reveal supervisors’ computer-mediated immediate behaviors and perceived immediacy both positively predict dissent. Some aspects of online communication attitudes positively predict computer-mediated immediate behaviors and perceived immediacy. In addition, attitudes toward online communication positively predict dissent. National culture influences some of these relationships; in each case the effects were substantively larger for the USA when compared to the other nations.

This study is the first to cross-culturally analyze dissent and immediacy. In addition, this study considers the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic influences the superior–subordinate relationship.

This paper investigates the mechanics of multimedia tie maintenance, with a particular emphasis upon social network sites (SNSs) and their uses and gratifications. We present results from a national sample of American adults (N = 571) of all ages, investigating the associations of several attitudinal and social variables with multimedia tie maintenance. We find that Facebook is used to maintain social ties at rates comparable to other media and is increasingly used to connect with close ties, contrary to previous literature. We also uncover highly significant patterns of “expressive” and “instrumental” engagement, isolating distinct expressive/instrumental orientations toward digital media in general and Facebook specifically. Respondents who displayed an expressive pattern of engagement with Facebook did not use non-SNS media to maintain ties any less frequently than those who do not use Facebook expressively. Respondents who displayed an instrumental pattern of engagement with Facebook meanwhile, supplemented their lack of SNS use to maintain ties by using other media more frequently for this purpose. This paper contributes to the literatures of media multiplexity, networked individualism, uses and gratifications theory, and social capital through SNSs. It makes a significant contribution to understanding the psychological and social gratifications of digital media, and their relationship to patterns of multimedia tie maintenance.

This study aims to understand the role of technology in relationship maintenance among romantic partners.

It takes a qualitative, inductive approach and collected data from in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who are married or in cohabiting relationships.

This study supports the extension of relationship maintenance typology derived from face-to-face relationship studies to technology-mediated communication, but highlights how technology use transforms the implementation of maintenance behaviors. Technology helps couples coordinate tasks and keep in touch with friends and families. Although technology-mediated communication cannot replace face-to-face interactions in relationship talk and sharing in-depth feelings, it plays an important role in redefining the ways in which couples interact positively, maintain mutual understanding, and secure the future of the relationship. Moreover, this study identifies a new maintenance behavior, communication coordination. These maintenance behaviors reflect a tension between maintaining connectivity and managing the boundary between work and home and between the public and private spheres.

This study builds on previous work on technology use and relationship maintenance, but takes a different qualitative, inductive approach to address the limitations in the survey research dominant in the literature. It helps us understand the advantages and challenges in maintaining relationships in the digital age and also explores the factors that influence the patterns of technology use in relationship maintenance.

Entrepreneurs approach the startup process with a stock of experience and a unique range of accumulated skills and abilities. Their prior experience shapes an “information funnel” through which the entrepreneurs’ attention is filtered. This study aims to investigate the impact of the relatedness of prior knowledge and knowledge acquisition activities on entrepreneurs’ perceived knowledge access.

Survey data were collected from 100 early-stage entrepreneurs in the New York City metropolitan area to empirically test the proposed relationships with the method of conditional process modeling.

Findings from this study demonstrate a negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ prior experience and their perceived ability to access knowledge. However, this negative relationship can be mitigated by seeking tacit knowledge through informal channels. In addition, the relatedness of prior experience plays a positive role in influencing media use and knowledge network engagement. While media use is a positive predictor of perceived knowledge access, engagement within knowledge networks shows no direct influence on perceived knowledge access.

This study sheds light on the dimensions of entrepreneurial knowledge and recognizes perceived knowledge access as an important concept in forming an entrepreneurial intention and adds to the current dialogue on the interpretation of entrepreneurs’ prior experience. For practitioners, this study offers insights into the formation of founding teams and the approaches to obtaining valuable information.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether the use of a shared study space played a role in shaping graduate students’ social networks by exploring how the copresence in space was related to the structure of friendship and advice networks. The authors first proposed two concepts of spatial copresence: measured spatial-temporal copresence and perceived copresence. The authors then examined the role of copresence through a case study of a shared study space occupied by 27 graduate students in the same department.

Copresence relations were first constructed through a six-month room access history data set and self-reported data to examine whether measured spatial-temporal copresence was consistent with perceived copresence. Friendship and advice network relations were then analyzed with copresence, social media connections, class project collaboration relations and social homophily (nationality, gender, cohort) through quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) and MQAP analysis.

The authors found that students who used the shared study space more often reported more friendship and advice ties. The perceived copresence and the measured spatial-temporal copresence were highly correlated. Copresence relations, as measured by survey and room access history, were both significantly correlated with advice relation, which was associated with perceived social support.

This study contributes to the debate about whether “space” continues to play significant roles in graduate students’ social networks in the context of flexible learning environments. The results also reveal new directions for research methods in studying spatial proximity in flexible settings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a world where different communication technologies support social connection, managing unavailability is as important as, if not more important than, managing availability. The need to manage unavailability becomes increasingly critical when users employ several communication tools to interact with various ties. A person's availability information disclosure may depend on different social relationships and the technologies used by the person. The study contributes to the literature by drawing on privacy management theory to investigate how users practice availability management and use its deceptive form, which is sometimes called a butler lie, with various ties across different messaging applications (apps) as part of their online privacy. Relevant factors in mediated communication, including facework, common ground, and interpersonal trust, are included in the developed model.

The authors conducted an online survey (n = 475) to explore the relationship between one's contact with different interactants (significant others, family members, close friends, acquaintances, groups of friends, and groups of acquaintances) and one's practice of availability management and use of butler lies with these interactants at different size levels on various messaging apps.

Factors such as facework, privacy related to technology, and privacy related to social relationships affect the practice of availability management and the use of butler lies. Notably, butler lies are used most frequently with acquaintances and groups of acquaintances and least frequently with significant others. Moreover, the practice of availability management and the use of butler lies are negatively moderated by people's conversational grounding and trust.

The study examined the practice of cross-app availability management with diverse social ties on mobile technologies, which is a socio-informatic practice that is widely adopted in the contemporary digital landscape but on which limited scientific and theoretic research has been conducted. No research has directly investigated users' availability management across multiple apps from a relational perspective. Building on the theoretical framework of privacy management, the paper aims to bridge the gap in the relevant literature. The results of this study can serve as a reference for library professionals to develop information literacy programs according to users' availability management needs. The results also provide insights to system designers for developing messaging tools.