Friendship and Social Media 99studies have conducted correlational analysis on cross- sectional data and thus
do not demonstrate clear evidence of causation, they indicate that frequency of
social media communication predicts relational closeness above and beyond that
explained by frequency of offline communication. Additionally, this line of work
has extended media multiplexity theory in two ways. First, media multiplexity may
observe a law of diminishing returns, such that the positive contribution of social
media communication may weaken as face- to- face communication frequency
increases (Ledbetter & Keating, 2015; Ledbetter & Kuznekoff, 2012). Second,
Ledbetter and Mazer (2014) found that Facebook use only predicted interdepen-
dence when the participant enjoyed communicating via Facebook. Thus, although
social media use may stimulate other kinds of communication (Vitak & Ellison,
2013) and more frequent communication is generally associated with friendship
closeness, friends may not grow closer if they do not enjoy using the medium; even
more generally, difficulties transitioning across communication media may impede
relational satisfaction (Caughlin & Sharabi, 2013).
Whether examining specific maintenance behaviors or media multiplexity, a
weakness of the extant research on social media friendship maintenance is its reli-
ance on cross- sectional survey measures. Sosik and Bazarova (2014) are a notable
exception, as they supplemented survey data with linguistic analyses of Facebook
messages between friends. Confirming the basic tenet of media multiplexity the-
ory (Haythornthwaite, 2005), the number of different Facebook channels used
(timeline posts, private messages, etc.) predicted relational escalation, as did the
frequency and recency of Facebook contact. In contrast, linguistic measures of rela-
tional maintenance behaviors (Stafford & Canary, 1991) did not predict relational
escalation. However, their results do not necessarily indicate that the content of
friendship maintenance is not worth studying; indeed, following the inverse asso-
ciations for public communication identified by Vitak (2012) and McEwan (2013),
perhaps the public versus private nature of messages moderates the relational out-
comes they produce. Additionally, relational escalation is not an outcome studied in
traditional relational maintenance research, and perhaps outcomes such as commit-
ment, control mutuality, or closeness (Stafford & Canary, 1991) would yield more
significant effects.
Social Capital and Social Support
Whereas research on impression formation and relational maintenance has tended
to focus on specific friendship dyads, studies of social capital focus attention on the
composition of friendship networks overall (Brooks, Hogan, Ellison, Lampe, &
Vitak, 2014); a closely related concern is social support, or the exchange of helpful
resources. Such research long predates social media, and has traditionally distin-
guished between bonding capital (i.e., strong ties that provide emotional support
and a sense of belonging) versus bridging capital (i.e., weaker ties focused on more