Social Connectedness on Facebook: An Explorative Study on Status Message Usage
Proceedings of 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems, 2010
11 Pages Posted: 16 Jul 2010
Date Written: July 16, 2010
Abstract
With over 400 million active users Facebook is undeniably a large social phenomenon and one of the largest social networks on the Internet. Together with Facebook a variety of novel communication styles have developed, dramatically influencing social interaction. The underlying paper reports the results of a survey (N=109) analyzing Facebook’s micro-blogging function available through users’ status updates. Our results suggest that the use of status update messaging generates a feeling of connectedness between users. Furthermore, non-parametric analyses distinguishing between low and high connected groups have been performed and experimentally confirmed the existence of distinct user profiles as a function of the variable “feeling connected.” The analyses revealed that the more individuals use their status message function to actively reveal information about themselves, the more connected they feel. Connectedness seems the result of active information sharing modulated by the amount of information shared rather than by the type of information an individual is sharing.
Keywords: Facebook, Connectedness, Social Network, Twitter, Status Update Messages, Quantitative Study and Survey
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