Final Report Summary - REDEFTIE (Redefining tie strength – how social media (can) help us to get non-redundant useful information and emotional support) Social media make it easy to stay in touch with many people. These people can be close friends (so-called strong ties), acquaintances (weak ties) or people we barely know (absent ties). Research on social networks assumed for decades that strong ties provide us with emotional support whereas weak ties provide us with useful non-redundant information. Are these assumptions still valid since the strong, weak, and absent ties are all “friends” on social media? Do social media change how and from whom we receive informational and emotional support? These were the central questions of the ERC starting grant project ReDefTie.The project consisted of three subprojects. In subproject 1, the causal relationships between social media use and indicators of informational and emotional support were studied in a longitudinal study in which we followed a representative sample of Dutch online users over four years. Subproject 2 focused on informational benefits and studied how people can form a correct knowledge representation of their social network (who knows what?) from the vast amount of ephemeral status updates. Subproject 3 focused on emotional benefits and examined whether social media only provide people with the illusion of connection or whether and under which circumstances they can provide actual emotional support.The results from the longitudinal study showed that Facebook users did not differ much from non-users (slightly higher levels of social support and stress, no difference in life satisfaction). Whereas social media use, especially actively asking for advice, was positively related to receiving online support, this social support barely affected stress and life-satisfaction, indicating that life satisfaction is mainly driven by stressful life-events. In the domain of civic engagement, we found that Twitter users report higher levels of civic engagement. However, this is mainly because highly engaged people are more likely to use Twitter and not because Twitter use increases civic engagement. For users of business networks such as LinkedIn, we found the strongest effects: the users consistently reported higher informational benefits than non-users, and these informational benefits were driven by posting about work-related content and the network composition.Subproject 2 on the informational benefits focused on ambient awareness, i.e. awareness of social others, derived from the reception of fragmented personal information, such as status updates on social media, as potential underlying process. We found that active Twitter users experience ambient awareness. Ambient awareness was not only a vague feeling, but users did actually know something about the people they follow. A series of experiments showed that people can and do spontaneously infer traits and also expertise from social media updates. Regularly skimming social media updates can thus help to identify experts and might thereby lead to increased informational benefits.Subproject 3 on the emotional benefits found that positive emotions (e.g. happiness) are more prevalent than negative emotions (e.g. envy) when browsing the Facebook newsfeed. If people experienced envy, it was usually benign envy, with a leveling up motivation. Even in situations in which people’s self-esteem was experimentally threatened, using Facebook reduced negative mood more than browsing a (comic) website. These results are against the hypothesis that browsing social media triggers unfavorable social comparisons; instead, they indicate that being reminded on one’s friends decreases negative mood. We also showed how regularly following the updates of a person can create a feeling of ambient intimacy and strengthen existing relationships. Across all subprojects, our results indicate that social media use has no severe negative effects on people’s well-being. Platforms designed for professional purposes such as LinkedIn, have however the potential to increase the informational benefits of their users.
