Friendship and Social Media 97Schumaker (2012) demonstrated the importance attached to visual information on
social media, with visual cues weighing more heavily than textual cues when assess-
ing a profile owner’s extraversion. Beyond visual cues, people may consider num-
ber of friends when evaluating others on social media, with Tong, Van Der Heide,
Langwell, and Walther (2008) finding a curvilinear effect, such that participants
judged those with a moderate number of friends as more socially attractive than
those with few or many friends.
Whereas the foregoing research has investigated the response of the profile
viewer, other research has considered the self- presentation of the profile owner. One
challenge to effective self- presentation across social media is context collapse, or the
broadcasting of a message across multiple friendship groups with differing social
norms (Vitak, Lampe, Gray, & Ellison, 2012). An appropriate disclosure among
intimate friends may not be appropriate among coworkers; emotional disclosures
may be particularly volatile, as some people are averse to public emotional displays
on social media (Bazarova, 2012). Accordingly, then, those with high concern for
self- presentation may choose to convey positive versus negative emotions in public
social media posts (Bazarova, Taft, Choi, & Cosley, 2013). However, the response
to emotional information communicated by social media may also depend on the
characteristics of the viewer; for example, High, Oeldorf- Hirsch, and Bellur (2014)
found emotional disclosures on social media were perceived more positively by
women, those who prefer online social interaction, and those who feel a sense of
community on the social media platform.
Relational Maintenance and Media Multiplexity
In contrast to research on impression formation, which has devoted central atten-
tion to early stages of relating, relational maintenance addresses behaviors intended
to keep a relationship alive over time (Stafford & Canary, 1991). Research in this
domain has focused on two aspects of social media: (1) identifying forms of social
media relational maintenance that differ from offline maintenance, and (2) elab-
orating how social media, as a communication channel, functions together with
other communication media to maintain relationships. This section addresses each
in turn.
Building from previous work identifying offline maintenance behaviors
(Stafford & Canary, 1991) and social media friendship rules (Bryant & Marmo,
2012), McEwan, Fletcher, Eden, and Sumner (2014) identified two additional
dimensions of relational maintenance specific to social media: (1) social contact,
or behaviors designed to initiate interaction with a friend (e.g., “I like my friend’s
status updates”), and (2) response- seeking, or public messages intended to elicit a
response from a friend (e.g., “I seek support by posting emotional news in hopes
that s/ he responds”). Notably, both behaviors address the extent to which dyad-
specific messages intersect with the public affordances of social media, and both