It's complicated: how romantic partners use facebook

  • Authors:

  • Xuan Zhao;Victoria Schwanda Sosik;Dan Cosley

  • Affiliations:

  • Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States;Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States;Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Romantic partners face issues of relational development including managing information privacy, tension between individual and relational needs, and accountability to existing friends. Prior work suggests that affordances of social media might highlight and shape these tensions; to explore this, we asked 20 people to reflect daily for two weeks on feelings and decisions around their own and others' Facebook use related to their relationships. Most generally, we find that tensions arise when romantic partners must manage multiple relationships simultaneously because Facebook audiences are so present and so varied. People also engage in subtle negotiation around and appropriation of Facebook's features to accomplish both personal and relational goals. By capturing both why people make these decisions and how Facebook's affordances support them, we expect our findings to generalize to many other social media tools and to inform theorizing about how these tools affect relational development.