Abstract
With a sample of 248 Hong Kong adolescents, this study probed the impact of media richness and communication control on teenagers' use of MSN® for online friendship development. Both media richness and communication control contributed to MSN's overall functionality and teenagers' self-presentation and friendship development. Media richness positively influenced both social and task communications and shortened the time needed to turn a stranger to friend, whereas communication control showed a positive relationship to social friendship communication. Rich features, such as webcam and MSN Spaces, facilitated the increase of acquaintances, new friends, opposite-sex friends, and total number of friends, whereas messaging helped build close friendships. Overall, media richness and communication control appeared to be valid constructs in explaining teenagers' MSN feature use and online friendship development.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 82-103 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Communication Quarterly |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2011 |
Scopus Subject Areas
- Communication
User-Defined Keywords
- Communication control
- Friendship development
- Instant messenger
- Interpersonal communication
- Media richness