"Online Social Networks Does Not Improve Adolescents' OfflineFriendships"

The effect of online social networking use by adolescents on their offline friendships has been a matter of intense debate since the prevalence of online social networking as the representative launch of Facebook in the year of 2004. Studies have been taken to examine the positive or negative effect of SNSs use on adolescents offline friendships, in another words, scholars are trying to find a prove or disagreement on the topic "Online Social Networks Does Not Improve Adolescents' Offline Friendships". Even E.Szwedo, Mikami and Allen have indicated in their study that in overall, maintaining a greater number of relationships online appears to have something akin to a leveling effect on adolescents' future levels of psychological adjustment, there is no evidence for the direct causality between the level of young adults' psychological adjustment and the intimacy or closeness of their offline friendships. Moreover, in the study of Pollet, Roberts and Dunbar's on the relationships between use of social media, network size and emotional closeness, their statistic results suggest more time spent using social media does not lead to a larger offline networks, or an emotionally close feeling to offline network members, compared to those people who do not use social media. For the reason of the Nie's "Time displacement" hypothesis, since each relationship needs to be actively maintained to prevent from decaying, the more time spent on maintaining online relationships sheds the chances of time spent on interacting with offline friends. Nonetheless, the computer-mediated-communication is not able to reach the equivalent level of face-to-face communication, in terms of signaling

affect, due to the lack of visual, auditory, and contextual cues.

However, as the technology related to social networking enhancement tools progresses tremendously, the gap between CMC and FTF is decreasing rapidly, it becomes much easier and even more convenient to maintain relationship online nowadays, for instance, the introduction of FaceTime, Skype, or Google Hangout has bridged the gap between friends due to distance or other reasons. The question now turns to that whether time displacement issue surpasses the benefits brought by the online social networking on maintaining or improving offline friendships and the functional purposes of which.

For one advantage is that SNSs has provided a valuable source of information for offline relations, found by Courtois and Vanwynsberghe in their study on how SNSs relieve the social anxiety while communicating with offline friends. By drawing upon the context of their friends’ online profile, adolescents gain more knowledge about their friends, whether they are distant acquaintances, or geographically close friends who they meet on a regular basis. Especially for people at this age with relatively higher degree of social anxiety when interacting with others, the removal of this entropy has been a remarkably positive mediation for building solid relationship. And as a bypass of the reduction of social anxiety, a more suitable context would be easily identified and engaged within the relationships, as they know each other well and thus know what types of topics they are willing to talk about.

One of the other advantages has been recognized as the social support for offline friendships due to the primary purpose of SNSs use, which might also be counterpart evidence against the “time displacement hypothesis”. In Reich, Subrahmanyam and Espinoza’s research, they found about three quarters of adolescents’ SNSs friend network are whom their subjects most interacted offline and also suggested that probably the use of SNSs would strengthen adolescents’ offline relationships.

Personally I tend to believe that the use of SNSs could improve adolescents’ offline friendships, even though given the results of studies into this topic, there is no direct evidence to conclude the positive correlation between each other, probably due to that I fell into my logic trap where the more you communicate with your friends with respect to the higher quality and more chances of the conversation, consequently the better friendship you will have.

Anyway, I am also inclined to specify the offline friendships into two different types, heterogeneous social networks where people are socializing with distant peers, and homogeneous groups with local friend. It would be interesting to examine different proportion of distant friends versus local friends influences the intimacy, closeness and satisfaction

level gained from friendship, since as I observed most Chinese students tend to use SNSs quite often but with distant friends at most of times, while somehow, they are excluding themselves from the local community or networking, which might lead to a low level of self-identify on the new environment they are in.