دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی فعالیت در رسانه های اجتماعی و صمیمیت در روابط اجتماعی - الزویر 2018

Abstract

We investigated associations between online and offline socialising and groups of social ties as postulated by the Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH). An online survey of social media use, social satisfaction and loneliness generated 249 complete responses from a sample of staff and students at the University of Manchester. Regression-based analyses showed that offline social activities and social time were positively associated with size of a core support group and social satisfaction. In contrast, social media time was positively associated with social satisfaction and the size of the total network, while the number of online contacts was positively related to social satisfaction, size of a wider sympathy group and total network size. No effect for loneliness was found. The number of ties reported for each SBH group was similar to that in previous studies. The more intimate support group (~5) appears to be more closely connected with offline social activities, whereas social media use and contacts influence the less intimate sympathy group (~15) and total network (~150). These findings provide further support for functional differences between different layers of closeness in personal networks, and they help us in further defining the boundaries of relationship enhancement via communication technology.

 Discussion

The status of all five hypotheses is summarised in Table 5. Discounting social time, H1 (on predicting total network size) was supported for all predictor variables. The association between social media contacts and the total offline network reflects the well-established finding that social media networks help to maintain real world social networks (Ellison et al., 2007; boyd & Ellison, 2007), while the link between social media time agrees with previous studies demonstrating links between frequency of Internet and social media use and the number of friends in social networks (Wellman et al., 2001; Kraut et al., 2002). However, no association was found with social satisfaction, possibly indicating that the positive relationship between social support and intensity or frequency of social media use (Ellison et al., 2007, Carr, Wohn & Hayes, 2016) may not translate into satisfaction. Regarding H2 (on predicting sympathy group size), partial support was found for social activity and social media contacts, possibly reflecting the volume of social media friends who may be influenced by offline friends at this more intimate level. Again no association was found with satisfaction; however, comparing the sympathy group with evidence for strong ties providing social support (Wright & Miller, 2010; Rains & Keating, 2011; Blight et al., 2015) is difficult since measures of strong ties in previous studies may overlap both sympathy and support groups in our study.