104 Who Are Our Friends?
may carry inherent meaning regardless of the message, and (3) a medium may serve
as a component of a causal chain of relational antecedents and outcomes. Or, stated
in terms of research on friendship relational maintenance, the first approach might
consider how a message communicating support to a friend might produce a dif-
ferent psychosocial outcome on Facebook than that same message communicated
face- to- face; the second approach might consider how the act of sending a support-
ive message to a friend signals the continuation of the relational tie, regardless of
the content of the message; and the third approach might examine how support-
ive messages on social media foster further communication across other media in
a causal chain.
Finally, research in social media friendship will perhaps demand even greater
interdisciplinary acumen than customary for scholars of close relationships. That is
not to say close relationships research is not interdisciplinary; to the contrary, the
field includes scholars across disciplines such as psychology, sociology, communica-
tion, and demography. Although diverse, what has united these disciplines, in part,
is an assumption that friendships (and other personal relationships) generally take
place in the private sphere. Social media problematizes this assumption by disrupt-
ing traditional boundaries between public and private (Frampton & Child, 2013;
Vitak et al., 2012). Case in point, user reaction to the Kramer et al. (2014) social
contagion research stemmed from the sense that a large corporation (and publicly
reported study) were intruding into the private world of their interpersonal rela-
tionships. To fully account for the increasingly public nature of friendships, close
relationships scholars would benefit from consulting disciplines with more robust
theories and vocabularies for considering the public sphere, such as mass commu-
nication, journalism, public relations, political science, and information technology.
As such, social media not only presents an intriguing site for expanding traditional
lines of friendship research but also calls close relationships scholars to consider
how friendship intersects with other domains of scholarly inquiry.
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