Online Friendship

Encyclopedia of Cyber Behavior Zheng Yan University at Albany, USA Volume I Managing Director: Senior Editorial Director: Book Production Manager: Development Manager: Acquisitions Editor: Typesetter: Cover Design: Lindsay Johnston Heather A. Probst Sean Woznicki Joel Gamon Erika Gallagher Jennifer Romanchak, Nicole Sparano Nick Newcomer, Lisandro Gonzalez Published in the United States of America by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global) 701 E. Chocolate Avenue Hershey PA 17033 Tel: 717-533-8845 Fax: 717-533-8661 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: https://www.igi-global.com Copyright © 2012 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher. Product or company names used in this set are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of cyber behavior / Zheng Yan, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “This book offers a complete look into the field of cyber behavior, surveying case studies, research, frameworks, techniques, technologies, and future developments relating to the way people interact and behave online”-- Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-4666-0315-8 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4666-0316-5 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4666-0317-2 (print & perpetual access) 1. Internet--Psychological aspects. 2. Computer networks--Psychological aspects. I. Yan, Zheng. BF637.C45.E53 2010 302.23’1--dc23 2011044984 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher. 412 Chapter 35 Online Friendship Lijun Tang Cardiff University, UK ABSTRACT This entry reviews and discusses several issues regarding online friendship. After introducing two opposite perspectives: the cues-iltered-out perspective and the social information process theory, it examines empirical studies with particular focuses on online friendships development, comparisons between online friendship and its ofline counterpart, and the impacts of online friendship on the ofline life. INTRODUCTION Online friendship refers to friendship formed in cyberspace which either stays online or moves to offline settings at different development stages. But what is friendship? Hays (1988) pointed out: The term ‘friendship’ is used very loosely and idiosyncratically, by both the general public and social scientists, to describe a diverse range of relationships. A ‘friend’ may be a casual companion with whom we play racquetball once a week, an intimate confidant with whom our most private thoughts and feelings are shared, someone we interact with every day, someone who lives DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0315-8.ch035 across the country and we only exchange letters with several times a year, someone we just met a few days ago, or someone we’ve known all our lives. (p.391) This suggests that friendship is an elusive term. Nevertheless, since friendship may refer to a range of relationships, a good starting point for a meaningful definition is to differentiate and clarify these relationships. One of the earliest accounts of friendship is offered by Aristotle (1955), who distinguished three kinds of friendships. The first one depends on utility. Both parties in this kind of relationship fulfil instrumental ends for each other. When one fails to do so, the relationship may come to the end. The second one is based on pleasure. Equally, Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Online Friendship when one party cannot provide pleasure for the other, such a relationship may break up. The third one focuses on goodness. This is the perfect and ideal friendship. Though the friend is useful and pleasant, this is not the underpinning reason for this kind of relationship. Rather, in this friendship, one loves the other for his/her character, and cares for the other’s well-being for his/her own sake. Aristotle’s account is still influential and relevant today, and many recent discussions differentiate friendships in similar ways. This implies that friendships differ in the types of social support/ resources that they provide. As such friendship can be understood as a range of voluntary and informal interpersonal relationships that involve varying types and degrees of practical assistance, companionship and fun, and emotional support and intimacy (see also Hays, 1988). The more types of resources it provides the higher quality and the more developed the friendship would tend to be (Spencer & Pahl, 2006). This probably explains why Aristotle saw the third type of friendship to be the perfect one as it is likely to involve all types of support. OVERVIEW Computer mediated communication (CMC) is the key to online friendship. Therefore it is not surprising that the relevant research attention was first turned to the nature of the medium and its implications for interpersonal relationships. In this respect, the social presence theory developed by Short, Williams, and Christie (1976) in the context of telecommunication has been influential. Social presence is related to the bandwidth of the medium: the acoustic, visual, and physical cues that it is able to convey. It argues that more cues will increase the social presence of communicators and make the interaction more intimate, warmer and more sociable. Along a similar line, Daft and Lengel (1984; 1986) developed the media richness theory which proposes that communication media differ in their capacities to process rich information. The theory assumes that face-to-face (FtF) is the richest medium, while written documents are media of low richness, due to their different capacities to carry non-verbal cues and provide immediate feedback. CMC, especially in the early days, is largely text-based and is regarded to be a low richness medium with narrow bandwidth (Rice, 1992). As a result, Ronald E. Rice and his colleagues’ research (Rice, 1984; Rice & Case 1983) suggested that CMC was less appropriate for social and emotional tasks but more suitable for straightforward information exchange. Though they found CMC was able to convey socio-emotional contents, Rice and his colleagues seemed to assume that this should not be overemphasized to overshadow the largely impersonal and task oriented nature of it (Rice, 1992; Rice & Love, 1987). In a similar way, Sproull and Kiesler (1986; 1991; Kiesler, 1986) argued that CMC filters out social context cues without which communicators feel a greater sense of anonymity and less inhibited from conducting anti-social behaviour. These stances are commonly referred to as the cues-filtered-out perspective which assumes that CMC is inherently impersonal and not conducive to interpersonal relationship development. By contrast, Joseph B. Walther (1992; 1996) developed the social information process (SIP) theory which suggests that given enough time CMC can foster interpersonal relationships. He argued that communicators can overcome the lack of social presence by adapting to the CMC environment and using linguistic code to convey social information. The absence of social and nonverbal cues does not stop social information exchange but merely slows down the exchange rate. Consequently, the SIP theory holds that CMC is not inherently impersonal and that it facilitates normal though temporally retarded relational development compared with FtF interaction. Furthermore, according to this theory, because physical cues are filtered out, senders can be selective in self 413 Online Friendship presentations and edit the messages they send out in favour of themselves; receivers on the other side construct idealised images of their partners and their relationships based on the received stylised messages. Through this process, ‘hyper-personal relationships’ are likely to form. The two perspectives are still relevant today and have provided guidance to many studies on interpersonal relationships online. Empirical Research on Online Friendship Ethnographic evidence seems to support the SIP theory and indicates that online friendships are common in cyber-communities (e.g., Baym, 2000; Carter, 2005; Kendall, 2002; Tang, 2010; Williams, 2003). Carter’s informants reported that their online friendships tended to be more emotional and ‘in a more personal way’ than their offline ones (p.160). Intimacy of online friendships for some participants, according to Carter (2005), seems to be superior to their offline friendships and thus appeared to be ‘hyper-personal’. Williams’ (2003) study suggests that while online relationships may be intimate for ‘long-timers’, for ‘newbies’ they may be fleeting and recreational. Parks and Floyds (1996) did the first survey study on online personal relationships. They randomly sampled 24 newsgroups and 22 participants from each group. Of the 528 prospective participants, 176 (33.3%) responded to their Email survey questionnaire. Nearly two third of these respondents reported to have developed a personal relationship with someone they just met online, half of which the study considered intimate. They also found that the longer and the more frequently one had contributed to newsgroups, the more likely he/she had developed a personal relationship online. In the Youth Internet Safety Survey conducted between 1999 and 2000, a national telephone survey in the USA of youths who were regular Internet users (using the Internet at least once a 414 month for the past six months) and aged between ten to seventeen (N = 1,501), 39 percent of the sample reported online friendship (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2002). Comparisons between Online and Offline Friendships For a better understanding of online friendship, a number of comparative studies have been carried out. Parks and Floyds’ (1996) initial survey was followed up and extended by Parks and Roberts (1998) who examined personal relationships formed in MOOs (multiuser dimensions, object oriented). Around 94 percent of the respondents reported forming personal relationships with other users. By comparing with the newsgroup type of study, the authors found that relationships were more intimate in the MOOs. This may be due to the difference between the media: while communication in newsgroups is asynchronous, it is synchronous and instant in MOOs. The study also asked respondents to rate their best MOO friend as well their best offline friend. The comparison suggested that offline friendships were likely to be longer in duration and involved more frequent interaction and more commitment. No difference was found however in terms of relationship depth (the level of self-disclosure) and width (the variety of discussion topics). In another study, Sheldon (2010) compared exclusive Facebook friendships with exclusive FtF ones, using a sample of 317 university students in the USA. The results showed that although both types of relationships turned out to be of similar durations (both 6 years on average) FtF friendships exhibited more breadth and depth than Facebook ones: FtF friends discussed a relatively larger variety of topics and more intimate topics among each other. However, in this study most respondents indicated that their exclusive Facebook friend was their long-distance friend, while their exclusive face-to-face friend was their best friend or their sibling; and most of the respondents Online Friendship also reported less frequent interaction with their exclusive Facebook friends than with their faceto-face ones. Using a sample of 134 respondents from a Canadian university, Buote, Wood, and Pratt (2009) similarly found that offline friendships tended to be rated higher in quality than online ones. The three studies described above did not seem to compare the two types of friendships on equal terms: in the Parks and Roberts study the durations of offline friendships were longer; Sheldon’s study tended to compare best offline friends with ordinary online friends; and Buote et al.’s study did not take into consideration of friendship duration. Chan and Cheng (2004) seemed to make a more equal comparison. They compared offline and online friendship qualities at different stages of relationship development using a questionnaire survey in 38 randomly selected Hong Kong newsgroups (N = 162). They asked respondents to think of two friendships of similar durations – one online and the other offline. The study yielded three major findings. First, overall the quality of offline friendships was rated higher than that of online ones. Secondly, the qualities of both online and offline friendships improved as the relationship developed over time. Thirdly, after one year’s relationship development the differences between the two types of friendships decreased. Nevertheless, the study also revealed that although the gap between the qualities of the two types of relationships narrowed after one year, it did not disappear. Using a representative sample of the adolescent population in Israel (N = 996), Gustavo Mesch (2005; Mesch & Talmud, 2006a; 2006b) also compared online and offline social relationships. Respondents were asked to indicate where they met their closest friend (online or offline). This study is different from above mentioned ones in that the comparison was between the respondents whose closest friend was online and those whose closest friend was offline. In other words, it did not compare online friendship with offline friend- ship of the same person. It found that compared with offline friendships those originated on the Internet were perceived as less close and supportive because they were relatively new and online friends were involved in less joint activities or topics of discussion. Although different in research designs and populations, research findings thus far seem to have reached consensus regarding one point: while online friendship is common, it is in general perceived to be of lower quality than its FtF counterpart. This conclusion, however, may hold only in a general sense, and under some exceptional circumstances it may not be applicable. According to McKenna, Green, and Gleason (2002) who studied interpersonal relationships developed in Internet newsgroups, one exception appears to be those who feel that the Internet allows them to present the ‘real self’ while offline settings do not. In the study, the respondents who located the ‘real me’ online tended to report that it was quicker to develop intimacy online and that online relationships involved more intimacy than offline ones. McKenna et al. argued that this is because anonymity and the easiness to find similar others online facilitate self-disclosure. This argument and similar findings are supported by a large amount of ethnographic evidence (e.g., Baym, 2000; Carter, 2005; Kendall, 2002; Tang, 2010). The question is who locate the ‘real me’ online. McKenna et al.’s study suggests that those who (1) experience social anxiety in FtF settings and (2) are lonely are more likely to do so. To be sure, these two categories are not the only ones, but they are the only ones undergone test so far. Shifting Online Friendship Offline While the medium may pose some limitations to online friendship, the development of the later may not be necessarily confined to the Internet space. It is common that online relationships shift to offline settings, such as telephone conversations and FtF meetings. Xie (2008) studied 415 Online Friendship a group of older Chinese Internet users’ (aged above 50) participation and relationships in one cyber-community. His respondents reported to be more likely to interact online with those whom they already met offline. This indicates that once shifted offline online friendship can become stronger and more intimate. The question that arises here is why and what offline meetings add to online friendship. Xue’s respondents reported that if they had not met their friends offline, they did not feel the urge to really know each other. This finding seemed to suggest that offline meetings serve to validate online friendships and help friends to build mutual trust which in turn encouraged intimate disclosure online. Tang’s research (2010) on a group of Chinese seafarers’ partners who were participating in a seafaring online community reached a similar conclusion. He further found that the more communication channels/social spaces online friends interacted with each other in, the more intimate and closer the relationship tended to be. This is because more communication channels/settings allow a wider range of discussion topics and joint activities. Tang points out that this may indicate a limitation of the online space for friendship – it does not support friendly provision of material help or physical companionship. This may help to explain why people generally feel that FtF friendship is of higher quality than online one. The Impact on the Offline Life In 1998 Robert Kraut and his colleagues proposed the highly controversial ‘Internet Paradox’ theory based on their HomeNet study which involved 93 families with 256 family members (Kraut, Patterson, Lundmark, Kiesler, Mukophadhyay, & Scherlis, 1998). This theory suggests that Internet use displaced strong social ties and led to increased feeling of social isolation and depression over time because the time Internet users spent online squeezed the time for interaction with neighbours and local communities. With no doubt, the 416 theory was heavily criticised on the ground that it assumed a rivalry relationship between CMC and FtF interaction. A large amount of research evidence, however, suggests that CMC complements rather than replaces offline social ties (see Putnam, 2000; Castells, 2001). Shapiro (1999) criticised the design of Kraut et al.’s study. One group of participants in the study were students who were likely to leave home when they finished high school in the period of the two-year study. The other group of participants were selected based on the criterion that one adult family member was involved in local community organizations. At the beginning of the study this group of participants had a high level of social connection. With time, however, their community involvement was likely to decline due to the phenomenon of ‘regression to the mean’. Thus, Shapiro argues that Kraut et al. unintentionally selected participants who were likely to reduce their social contacts even without Internet access. Kraut and his colleagues (2002) revised their previous conclusions and suggested a ‘rich-getricher’ model after conducting two separate follow-up studies. In the first follow-up study which used the original sample of the HomeNent study, they found that the negative effects associated with Internet use in the first study had disappeared. The second follow up study which used a new sample showed that for the extrovert participants Internet use led to an increased community involvement and decreased feeling of loneliness over time, but for the introvert participants the result was the opposite. By contrast, McKenna and Bargh (2000) and McKenna, Green, and Gleason (2002) argued that anonymity, disembodiment, and the easiness to find similar others online actually help the introvert disclose themselves and make friends, and thus alleviate the sense of loneliness. They suggested that CMC can compensate the lack of interpersonal skills. Further research evidence shows mixed support and rejection to the ‘rich-get-richer’ model and Online Friendship the social compensation thesis. According to the research of Leung (2002) and Seepersad (2004), lonely individuals were more likely to pursue entertainment rather than communication activities and they were less likely to reveal self information online, which made it difficult for them to form interpersonal relationships online and to alleviate the sense of loneliness. Morahan-Martin and Schumacher (2003), however, found that lonely students were engaged more in communication use of Internet than their non-lonely counterparts. These findings are certainly contradictory and confusing. To clarify the issue, Peter, Valkenburg, and Schouten (2005) incorporated the two perspectives in one model. They found that the link between introversion and formation of online friendship is not direct but mediated by online selfdisclosure, frequency of online communication, and the social compensation motive. Introversion negatively affects online self-disclosure and frequency of online communication, but it positively affects social compensation motive which in turn positively influences online self-disclosure and frequency of online communication. All three moderators were found to be positively related to online friendship formation. Thus, the introvert is likely to form online friendships through the route of social compensation, although in some cases this route may be overshadowed by the lack of self-disclosure and infrequent communication. Despite the controversies, it is widely accepted that online friendship is a form of social capital (Putnam, 2000). It reflects one additional way of relating. While online friendship may not provide as many types of social support as its offline counterpart, it adds to individuals’ existing social network and provides additional resources. This is especially beneficial for those who may have difficulties in real life to find similar others with whom they can share common interests, concerns, and problems. Research about online support groups provides the most visible examples (e.g., Orgad, 2005; Pitts, 2004; Tang, 2010). In these groups, participants reported a feeling of bonding and a sense of mutual attachment and solidarity. These groups constituted valuable social networks for participants, where they shared ups and downs and provided each other with important resources, such as validation of experiences, sympathy, acceptance, and encouragement. It was found that this had a therapeutic value and promoted participants’ well-beings. Furthermore, these networks were unlikely to be available offline, and as such online relationships helped support group participants to overcome the feeling of isolation and alienation. The question arising here is who are likely to make friends online and who are not. Mesch and Talmud (2006a) found that those who use the Internet for social purposes are more likely to form friendships online, while those who use it for informational reasons are less likely. This finding begs further questions: who are more likely to use the Internet for social purposes and who are not? Research evidence also shows that females are more likely than males to form friendships online. They are also more likely to report close friendships than males (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2002; McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002). This is perhaps because females tend to reveal more about themselves online than males (Peter, Valkenburg, & Schouten, 2005). This seems to replicate offline behaviour – females tend to disclosure more of their feelings than males (Rose, 2002). Mesch’s study (2005) of Israeli adolescents’ online and offline social relationships however found that boys were more likely than girls to report having online friends. This may be due to different research designs. While other studies focussed exclusively on Internet users, Mesch’s study surveyed the general population that included non-Internet users. Furthermore, it required respondents to name six friends and then asked them to indicate where they initially met the friends. Perhaps girls in this survey tended to name friends that they met offline. 417 Online Friendship FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Research evidence appears to render support to both the cues-filtered-out perspective and the SIP theory to a certain extent. On the one hand, given enough time friendship can thrive on the Internet; and on the other, online friendship tends to be rated lower in quality than its FtF counterpart. This indicates that communication media have an impact on interpersonal relationship development. Self-disclosure facilitated by the Internet represents one mode of relating. Other modes of relating which also help relationship development, such as joint physical activities and material support, however, cannot be done on the Internet. Maybe for this reason, people shift their online friendships offline. The shifting reveals the limitation of the medium. The acknowledgement of the role that technology plays does not imply technology determinism. According to the SIP theory every Internet user can make friends online. It would be surprising however if this was true in reality. The reason for the gap between the theory and the reality arguably lies in social contexts. Therefore, social contexts and conditions have to be taken into account in order to have a better understanding of the online friendship formation and development. What social contexts facilitate the development of online friendship? What does not? If social contexts are a driver for friendship formation, how do changes in social contexts affect existing online friendship? 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