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Keeping in touch by technology: maintaining friendships after a residential move

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Many observers have praised new communication technologies for providing convenient and affordable tools for maintaining relationships at a distance. Yet the precise role of mediated communication in relationship maintenance has been difficult to isolate. In this paper, we treat residential moves as natural experiments that threaten existing social relationships and often force people to rely on mediated communication to maintain their old relationships. Results from a 3-wave survey of 900 residential movers describing 1892 relationships shows that email and the telephone play different roles in social relationships. Email helps maintain social relationships, in the sense that relationships decline when email drops after the move. However increases in email are not associated with increases in the depth of the relationship or exchanges of support. In contrast, phone calls help movers grow relationships and exchange social support.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2008
      1870 pages
      ISBN:9781605580111
      DOI:10.1145/1357054
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 06 April 2008

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      1. cmc
      2. communication
      3. friendship
      4. mobility
      5. social relationships

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      • (2024)I feel being there, they feel being together: Exploring How Telepresence Robots Facilitate Long-Distance Family CommunicationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642305(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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