How do we keep in touch? : Facebook, everyday talk, and friends' geographic distance

Abstract

This study considered the relationship between everyday talk and communication media, geographic distance, and closeness in the context of friendships. Participants included 213 adults from two colleges and those collected from the site Facebook.com. All participants completed surveys which included questions on their everyday talk use with friends across Facebook and face-to-face media, along with self-reports of closeness, relational length, and geographic distance of those friendships. Pearson's product-moment correlations supported both hypotheses, suggesting friends' use of Facebook and face-to-face everyday talk is positively associated with closeness. A series of Hotelling's t-tests for correlated correlations showed a stronger correlation between closeness and face-to-face everyday talk than closeness and Facebook everyday talk. These results showed the different types of everyday talk that friends engage in, specifically that long-distance friends were more likely to use Facebook task, relational, deep, superficial, and informal everyday talk in their relationship. A series of 2 (participant sex) X 2 (communication media) repeated measures of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were also run. One ANCOVA was conducted for each of the five everyday talk types, showing five significant interaction effects between medium and distance. Specifically, local friends engaged in more Facebook everyday talk whereas long-distance friends engaged in more face-to-face everyday talk, clarifying previous nonsignificant findings between distance and relationship characteristics.