Making Friends in Cyberspace

Abstract

From its birth as a way of linking a few university and defense laboratories in the late 1960s, the Internet has grown into a global network connecting between 30 and 40 million people (Elmer-Dewitt, 1995). Social linkages in the form of E-mail and discussion groups appeared in the first days of the Internet and have grown explosively ever since. Today there are over 5,000 Internet discussion groups (Hahn & Stout, 1994). Aside from its sheer size, this new social milieu commands scholarly attention because it is one of the new “collaborative mass media forms” in which messages come from a wide variety of participants with little or no centralized control (Rafaeli & LaRose, 1993). It therefore blurs the traditional boundaries between interpersonal and mass communication phenomena and raises new opportunities and risks for the way individuals relate to one another (Lea & Spears, 1995; Williams & Rice, 1983). The purpose of this study was to examine the relational world actually being created through Internet discussion groups (usually called newsgroups).(1) Because the development of personal relationships is a pivotal issue in the larger debate about human relations in cyberspace, this study explores four basic questions: How often do personal relationships form in Internet newsgroups, who has them, how close or developed do they become, and do relationships started on line migrate to other settings? We begin by examining two conflicting visions that have dominated popular and scholarly debate. On one side are those who view on-line relationships as shallow, impersonal, and often hostile. They assert that only the illusion of community can be created in cyberspace (e.g., Beninger, 1987; Berry, 1993; Heim, 1992; Stoll, 1995). On the other side are those who argue that computer-mediated communication liberates interpersonal relations from the confines of physical locality and thus creates opportunities for new, but genuine, personal relationships and communities (e.g., Pool, 1983; Rheingold, 1993). One vision is of relationships lost, while the other is of relationships liberated and found. These conflicting visions are not, of course, unique to debates about computer-mediated communication. Instead they reflect long-running, historical debates about the nature of modernity and the social effects of changes in communication and transportation technology (Marvin, 1987; Wellman, 1979). More specific versions of these debates can be found in the literature on the effects of the reduction in communicative cues associated with computer-mediated communication. They are also reflected in the sharply differing applications of personal relationship theories to on-line settings. Most of the early research on computer-mediated communication involved laboratory studies in which small groups worked on structured problems for limited periods of time (Garton & Wellman, 1995). Groups that communicated by means of computer (CMC) were compared to groups that communicated face-to-face (FtF). Findings from this line of research have generally emphasized the social disadvantages of computer-mediated communication, therefore implying that highly developed, positive personal relationships should occur infrequently in on-line settings. Computer-mediated groups, for example, have greater difficulty recognizing and moving toward shared points of view (Kiesler & Sproull, 1992). People in CMC groups also engage in more verbal aggression, blunt disclosure, and nonconforming behavior than people in FtF groups (Dubrovsky, Kiesler, & Sethna, 1991; Siegal, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, & McGuire, 1986). Such behavior is usually called “flaming,” and it has been observed both in laboratory settings and in a variety of business, governmental, educational, and public networks (e.g., Hiltz, Turoff, & Johnson, 1989; Lea, O'Shea, Fung, & Spears, 1992; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986; Thompsen & Ahn, 1992). Such findings may reflect the comparative anonymity afforded by CMC or local norms that make the overt expression of hostility more acceptable in on-line settings (Lea et al., 1992; Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1989; Spears & Lea, 1994; Zimbardo, 1969). These differences are most often explained by observing that social cues are filtered out in on-line settings (Culnan & Markus, 1987). Relational cues emanating from the physical context are missing, as are nonverbal cues regarding vocal qualities, bodily movement, facial expressions, and physical appearance. CMC is thus judged to have a narrower bandwidth and less information richness than FtF communication (see Daft & Lengel, 1984; Kiesler, Siegal, & McGuire, 1984). According to both social presence theory (Rice, 1987; Rice & Love, 1987; Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) and social context cues theory (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991), this reduction in contextual, visual, and aural cues should cause communication in on-line settings to be more impersonal and nonconforming than communication in face-to-face settings. Both th