Social and Parasocial Relationships on Social Network Sites(9)

friendships.However,those highly relying on parasocial re-lationships might tend toward addiction in order to escape from their existing friendships.Conceptualizing those miss-ing mediators may empirically solve why different types of relationships are similarly related with addictive SNS use. Third,this study focuses only on the number of relation-ships of each type,but not the intensity of each relationship. For example,assume two SNS users,one of whom forms10 reciprocal relationships while the other has100relationships. In terms of intensely interactive relationships,the two users might not be different because most SNS activities happen around a few selected friends.5Even if a person forms100 reciprocal relationships,she mainly exchanges messages with her close friends or family members.While the number of relationships is still a meaningful measure of SNS use,future studies might derive interesting?ndings by conceptualizing different dimensions of SNS use that are not examined here, such as relationship intensity.

Fourth,parasocial relationships can be further divided.For example,SNS users can form parasocial relationships with noncelebrities(e.g.,famous bloggers).Also experience of parasocial relationships with celebrities might not be homo-geneous because some are responsive while others not.Based on previous studies,20,23,25parasocial relationships with noncelebrities or highly interactive celebrities reduces psy-chological distance between audience and target,which in turn increases identi?cation and results in psychological less negative or even positive outcomes.In other words,further classi?cation of parasocial relationships remains an interest-ing research question in the future.

Finally,intercultural differences should be critically considered.Given that the Korean culture is strongly char-acterized by collectivism,a strong association between dependency on SNS relationships and SNS addiction might re?ect the uniqueness of Korean society.Since people in a collectivistic culture feel a strong obligation to give prompt responses to others’communicative overtures,users main-taining more social relationships are more likely to be ad-dicted to SNSs.To assess whether?ndings from this study hold true elsewhere,replicating this study in a different cul-ture(e.g.,an individualistic culture like that of the United States)would be necessary.

Despite several limitations,our study’s?ndings are novel and demonstrate that the psychological effects of SNSs differ, depending on the way users form relationships with other users.This study also shows that interactive media originally designed for social interaction can be used like old-fashioned mass media,as exempli?ed by an audience’s imaginary re-lationship with celebrities.Most importantly,reciprocal SNS mediated relationships contribute to increases in social trust and belongingness,in the same way that face to face rela-tionships do.In terms of psychological well-being,this study advises that close examination of potentially problematic usages of SNSs(e.g.,parasocial relationships highlighted in this study),rather than SNSs themselves,would be more productive both theoretically and practically.

Notes

a.This study has no intention to argue reciprocal online mediated interaction is inferior or superior to a face to face one.Social presence theory,3,10for example,might argue that online mediated interaction is inferior to a face to face one because its social cues are limited.However,social informa-tion processing theory may argue that online mediated interaction could be more advantageous because users can engage in more selective self-presentation.

b.While the correlation between two types of SNS rela-tionships is not huge,the observed0.25correlation is not totally ignorable.In fact,time for SNS use shows a correlation between dependency on parasocial relationships(r=0.17, p<0.001)and dependency on social relationships(r=0.11, p<0.05),indicating that heavy SNS users are active in form-ing both types of relationships.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr.June Woong Rhee,Dr.Eunmee Kim, and Dr.Irkwon Jeong for their valuable comments on the?rst draft of this article.

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing?nancial interests exist.

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