Nancy K. Baym

Social Interactions Across Media Interpersonal Communication on the Internet, Telephone and Face-to-Face

Two studies compared college students’ interpersonal interaction online, face-to-face, and on the telephone. A communication diary assessed the relative amount of social interactions college students conducted online compared to face-to-face conversation and telephone calls. Results indicated that while the internet was integrated into college students’ social lives, face-to-face communication remained the dominant mode of interaction. Participants reported using the internet as often as the telephone. A survey compared reported use of the internet within local and long distance social circles to the use of other media within those circles, and examined participants’ most recent significant social interactions conducted across media in terms of purposes, contexts, and quality. Internet interaction was perceived as high in quality, but slightly lower than other media. Results were compared to previous conceptualizations of the roles of internet in one’s social life.

Amateur experts International fan labour in Swedish independent music

• With the rise of Web 2.0 have come increased opportunities for fans to serve as filters, influencing the global flow of cultural materials. On the one hand, this represents a giant leap forward for fans, who can now serve new roles without industry support. On the other, it represents a potentially exploitative transformation of media industries in which unpaid volunteers do the labour that professionals are paid to do. This article examines this tension with a close analysis of the global Internet scene around Swedish independent music. Interviews with music industry actors and particularly active fans are used to establish the value of fan practices to the industry and to examine how the fans understand the tensions between their own costs and rewards, exploitation and empowerment. •

TUNES THAT BIND?: Predicting friendship strength in a music-based social network

Despite the popularity of social network sites based on common interests, the association between these shared interests and relational development is not well understood. This manuscript reports results of an empirical investigation of interpersonal relationships on Last.fm, a music-based social network site with a multinational user base. In addition to baseline descriptors of relational behavior, the chief goals of this study were to examine the degree to which Last.fm relationships are characterized by homophily (and particularly by shared musical taste), the extent to which communication via Last.fm is associated with other forms of communication (both offline and online), how such communication behavior is associated with demographic and relational characteristics, and whether these variables predict strength of relational development. Results indicate that although Last.fm relational partners exhibit shared musical taste, this shared taste is not associated with relational development. Rather, following media multiplexity theory, relational development is strongly and uniquely associated with communication behavior across almost all forms of communication (including Last.fm). These results suggest that shared interests may foster the creation of weak ties, but conversion of these connections to strong ties is relatively rare.

Calling and texting (too much): Mobile maintenance expectations, (over)dependence, entrapment, and friendship satisfaction:

This article uses dialectical theory to examine how mobile phone use in close friendships affects relational expectations, the experiences of dependence, overdependence, and entrapment, and how those experiences affect relational satisfaction. Results suggest that increased mobile phone use for the purpose of relational maintenance has contradictory consequences for close friendships. Using mobile phones in close relationships increased expectations of relationship maintenance through mobile phones. Increased mobile maintenance expectations positively predicted dependence, which increased satisfaction, and positively predicted overdependence, which decreased satisfaction. Additionally, entrapment, the guilt and pressure to respond to mobile phone contact, uniquely predicted dissatisfaction. The results are interpreted in relation to the interdependent dialectical tensions of friendship, media entrapment, and the logic of perpetual contact.

Relational quality and media use in interpersonal relationships

This study examines the relationship between relational quality and media use in relationships. In addition, the impacts of other potentially important variables such as the sex and relationship type of the participants and their partners are explored. College student participants focused on interaction experiences with an acquaintance, friend, romantic partner or family member. The results indicated that participant sex and partner sex did not affect reported media use, whereas relationship type had significant effects on the extent to which face-to-face and telephone communication were used. Relationships with acquaintances had the lowest relational quality and romantic relationships, while closer, were less satisfying than either family or friendship relationships. Same-sex relationships were perceived as more satisfying than cross-sex relationships. Finally, media use did not predict relational closeness or satisfaction.

The Swedish Model: Balancing Markets and Gifts in the Music Industry

The internet has destabilized media industries. This article uses the case of Swedish independent music labels, musicians, and fans to articulate one model for understanding the new roles each can take in this new context. Interviews, participant observation, and popular media coverage are used to show how labels and musicians in this scene loosely organize with fans to create a gift economy among themselves. Although they seek to earn money, they are not focused getting it from the audience. Instead, they engage the audience as equals with whom they can build a larger community that benefits them all. The article shows how they use giving songs away and engaging directly with audience members through the internet to pursue this goal. In contrast to discourses against file sharing, the analysis demonstrates how media producers may reconcile themselves to the participatory culture of the Internet.

Connect With Your Audience! The Relational Labor of Connection

The theme of Console-ing Passions this year is cultivating community, a topic about which I have had much to say in the context of fan practices. In my work on fans of soap operas (e.g. Baym, 2000)...

INTRODUCTION: Internet Research as It Isn't, Is, Could Be, and Should Be

This is the authors accepted manuscript. The publishers version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01972240591007535.

Put down that phone and talk to me: Understanding the roles of mobile phone norm adherence and similarity in relationships

This study uses co-orientation theory to examine the impact of mobile phone use on relational quality across three copresent contexts. It investigates the relationship between perceived similarity, actual similarity, and understanding of mobile phone usage on relationship outcomes, and uses a new measure of mobile relational interference to assess how commitment, satisfaction, and liking are affected by perceptions of relational partners’ mobile phone use. Contrary to popular belief, the results from this study of 69 dyads reveals that, at least within a sample of young Americans, failing to adhere to injunctive (i.e., societal) norms regarding mobile phone usage does not impact relational quality. Rather, results indicate that perceived adherence to participants’ own internal standards—by both the participant, and the participant’s relational partner—and perceived similarity between partners were more influential.

Thinking of You: Vernacular Affordance in the Context of the Microsocial Relationship App, Couple

The concept of “affordance” stakes out a middle ground between social constructivism and technological determinism, seeking to account for how material qualities of technologies constrain or invite practices while also accommodating emergent meanings. Yet we know little about how people themselves understand affordances in their encounters with technology. This article treats vernacular accounts of material structure and practice as clues to the ways that people understand and negotiate technology in their everyday lives. We studied the experiences of romantic partners who use Couple, a relationship app touted as a “social network of two,” and part of an emerging class of “microsocial” platforms. Partners who use Couple have limited knowledge of how others use the app, which offered us a unique lens for witnessing how people make sense of the relationship between practice and material structure. We conducted qualitative interviews with romantic pairs who use Couple, attending to how interviewees conceived of its capabilities, features, and position within larger media ecologies. We argue that affordances simultaneously exist for people at multiple levels of scale, for example: infrastructure, device, app, feature, and so on. These levels are theoretically distinct but can intersect conceptually as people make sense of technological systems and adapt their practices, or create new ones. This approach opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between technologies and practices by drawing attention to how different vernacular frames, such as “choice” or “constraint,” reflect particular ways of accounting for material structure.