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The Impact Of Social Media On Relationships Essay

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Ellison et al believed that Facebook is a ‘rich site’ for research into the quality of relationships due its ‘heavy usage patterns’ and the mechanics of how it is more about offline to online relationships due the nature of the creation of the site, for university students to communicate. Facebook in incredibly different from other CMC as many users actually know most their ‘friends’ in real terms on the site. MySpace, which was set up in 2003, has over 200m users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005 for $580m (Randerson, 2007) February 2004 saw the launch of Facebook (Facebook.com) It’s creator Mark Zuckerberg launched the site with co-founders and room mates Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo …show more content…

With 50% of users logging on to Facebook everyday and more than 35 million users updating their status’s everyday (Facebook a, 2010), it posses the question what effect are social networking sites, mainly Facebook, having on our friendships? Are we extending our social networking and enriching them? Or are the effects of the ease and accessibility of a ‘friend’ demeaning our relationships? Not in the to distant past before the internet and the mobile telephone, if friends wanted to contact each other they would either have to know the phone number of their friend (or find it in a phone book) and call them, or visit them directly at their residence. As with any social situation there inevitably would have been occasions when a friend would have ‘bumped into’ another friend whilst passing the same area or at the same social event. Obviously with the development of the mobile phone it meant that providing one had an individual’s mobile telephone number, one would be able to contact the individual regardless of the location the friend was in. With Facebook’s infrastructure, one friend is able to contact another in a multitude of ways, whether it be to send an E-mail type message using Facebook’s messaging system, a comment on their profile, a comment on a photo, a comment on a link,

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