Natalya N. Bazarova

Managing Impressions and Relationships on Facebook: Self- Presentational and Relational Concerns Revealed Through the Analysis of Language Style

The merging of audiences in social media and the variety of participation structures they present, including different audience sizes and interaction targets, pose questions about how people respond to these new communication situations. This research examined self-presentational and relational concerns through the analysis of language styles on Facebook. The authors collected a corpus of status updates, wall posts, and private messages from 79 participants. These messages varied in certain characteristics of language style, revealing differences in underlying self-presentational and relational concerns based on the publicness and directedness of the interaction. Positive emotion words correlated with self-reported self-presentational concerns in status updates, suggesting a strategic use of sharing positive emotions in public and nondirected communication via status updates. Verbal immediacy correlated with partner familiarity in wall posts but not in private messages, suggesting that verbal immediacy cues serve as markers to differentiate between more and less familiar partners in public wall posts.

From Perception to Behavior: Disclosure Reciprocity and the Intensification of Intimacy in Computer-Mediated Communication

This study proposes and tests a novel theoretical mechanism to explain increased self-disclosure intimacy in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) versus face-to-face (FtF) interactions. On the basis of joint effects of perception intensification processes in CMC and the disclosure reciprocity norm, the authors predict a perception-behavior intensification effect, according to which people perceive partners’ initial disclosures as more intimate in CMC than FtF and, consequently, reciprocate with more intimate disclosures of their own. An experiment compares disclosure reciprocity in text-based CMC and FtF conversations, in which participants interacted with a confederate who made either intimate or nonintimate disclosures across the two communication media. The utterances generated by the participants are coded for disclosure frequency and intimacy. Consistent with the proposed perception-behavior intensification effect, CMC participants perceive the confederate’s disclosures as more intimate, and, importantly, reciprocate with more intimate disclosures than FtF participants do.

Automatic Archiving versus Default Deletion: What Snapchat Tells Us About Ephemerality in Design

Unlike most social media, where automatic archiving of data is the default, Snapchat defaults to ephemerality: deleting content shortly after it is viewed by a receiver. Interviews with 25 Snapchat users show that ephemerality plays a key role in shaping their practices. Along with friend-adding features that facilitate a network of mostly close relations, default deletion affords everyday, mundane talk and reduces self-consciousness while encouraging playful interaction. Further, although receivers can save content through screenshots, senders are notified; this selective saving with notification supports complex information norms that preserve the feel of ephemeral communication while supporting the capture of meaningful content. This dance of giving and taking, sharing and showing, and agency for both senders and receivers provides the basis for a rich design space of mechanisms, levels, and domains for ephemerality.

Relational maintenance on social network sites: How Facebook communication predicts relational escalation

Abstract Social network sites are popular communication tools that help people maintain relationships with their friends, yet there has been little research examining how people use these tools to enact relationship maintenance. By analyzing communication between individual friendships on a popular social network site, Facebook, this research examines types of maintenance behaviors enacted on the site, and how they predict relational escalation of Facebook friendships. Results show that most relationships go through a gradual rather than an extreme change and that these changes reflect both relational escalation and de-escalation. Temporal patterns—more recent and more frequent communication—predict relationship escalation, as does use of more different types of communication within Facebook, particularly private messages and photo tags. However, enactment of traditional relationship maintenance strategies as captured by the linguistic analysis of Facebook communication content using LIWC does not predict relationship escalation. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of the ways that the functionality of social network sites can help users engage in new types of relationship maintenance.

Age Differences in Online Social Networking: Extending Socioemotional Selectivity Theory to Social Network Sites

This article extends socioemotional selectivity theory to online social networking by examining age differences in the size and composition of Facebook networks across a wide age range of Facebook users (18 to 93 years old) in a nationally representative sample. Findings suggest increasing selectivity of Facebook social partners with age. Compared to younger adults, friend networks of older adults are smaller but contain a greater proportion of individuals who are considered to be actual friends. Moreover, a higher proportion of actual to total Facebook friends is associated with lower levels of social isolation and loneliness across the life span.

Alexa is my new BFF: Social Roles, User Satisfaction, and Personification of the Amazon Echo

Amazons Echo and its conversational agent Alexa open exciting opportunities for understanding how people perceive and interact with virtual agents. Drawing from user reviews of the Echo posted to Amazon.com, this case study explores the degree to which user reviews indicate personification of the device, sociability level of interactions, factors linked with personification, and influences on user satisfaction. Results indicate marked variance in how people refer to the device, with over half using the personified name Alexa but most referencing the device with object pronouns. Degree of device personification is linked with sociability of interactions: greater personification co-occurs with more social interactions with the Echo. Reviewers mentioning multiple member households are more likely to personify the device than reviewers mentioning living alone. Even after controlling for technical issues, personification predicts user satisfaction with the Echo.

Minority Influence in Virtual Groups A Comparison of Four Theories of Minority Influence

This study examined minority influence within virtual groups and how members’ geographic dispersion and argument consistency affect group decisions. Competing predictions were derived from several theories that were applicable but untested in the domain of online interaction: a double minority effect, the black sheep effect, congruity theory applied to groups, and the minority leniency contract framework. Online groups were created that had 4 collocated members or 4 geographically distributed members, or 2 collocated and 2 isolated members. Group members were provided biased distributions of information resembling a hidden profile to facilitate majority and minority positions resulting in 24 groups with a minority opinion holder geographically isolated or in proximity with one or more other members. The patterns of minority members’ influence on majority members’ decisions lent greatest support to the black sheep effect, congruity, and minority leniency approaches, depending on the respective location of the minority opinion holders and the consistency with which they argued their positions.

Managing Stigma: Disclosure-Response Communication Patterns in Pro-Anorexic Websites

Pro-anorexic websites are a popular online venue for individuals with anorexia, but recent research suggests that they play a role of “online negative enabling support groups” because they can undermine recovery and encourage negative behaviors by validating pro-anorexic views. By analyzing 22,811 messages from 5,590 conversations from the Pro-Ana Nation online discussion board forum, this study examines communicative mechanisms of online negative enabling support through language analysis of disclosure-response sequences, changes in the language of the initial discloser within an interaction exchange, and the role of responses in eliciting those changes. The findings show that initiating disclosures containing stigma-related emotion words, anorexia-specific content, and sociorelational content are typically met with negatively valenced responses from other members of the pro-anorexic community. Moreover, although the act of revealing stigmatized information has some cathartic effects, disclosers use more, not fewer, stigma-related emotion words when they receive negatively valenced responses. These results provide insight into communicative dynamics and effects of online negative enabling support through validation of the pro-anorexic identity and the dangerous cycle of stigma escalation in disclosure-response exchanges on pro-anorexic online communities.

From Dispositional Attributions to Behavior Motives The Folk-Conceptual Theory and Implications for Communication

This chapter introduces a new theoretical account of attribution—the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanations (Malle, 1999)—to communication and discusses its implications for understanding communication phenomena. This new perspective has emerged from concerns about classic attribution theory, based on the person-situation distinction, and its ability to account for the cognitive complexity and social functions of attributions. The folk-conceptual theory distinguishes between explanations for intentional and unintentional behaviors, capturing different types of motives that can be inferred for intentional behaviors, and links explanations with their social and communicative functions. We lay out several directions for the theory to be usefully explored in communication to extend the field’s thinking about how attributions are affected by, affect, and are communicated in social interaction. At the same time, we discuss how communication perspectives can enrich the folk-conceptual theory by integrating the socio-communicative context more fully into the analysis of explanations in social interaction.

Attributions After a Group Failure: Do They Matter? Effects of Attributions on Group Communication and Performance

Attributions have been studied extensively in groups, yet little is known about the effects attributions have on group communication and performance. This study examines how attributions for a group failure affect socioemotional communication, procedural changes, effort, and performance on the next task. Three-member computer-mediated groups worked on two decision-making tasks. All groups received bogus failure feedback for the first task and, dependent on the attributional condition, members were led to attribute the failure either to self, other members, the group as a whole, or situational constraints. The results demonstrate that the way group members explain previous performance influences subsequent group processes and performance. Specifically, attribution to situational constraints prompted groups to discuss and change communication procedures. Attributing failure to the self or group yielded the highest effort. Attributions to others increased the ratio of negative to positive socioemotional communication and decreased performance quality.