How people disclose themselves differently according to the strength of relationship in SNS?

Abstract

Self-disclosure is defined as “act of revealing personal information to others” (Archer, 1980, p.183). It plays a key role in development and maintenance of relationships. Since many companies adopt social networking services for their organizational information sharing platform, it is important to identify the process of creating and maintaining social relationship in virtual spaces for successful adoption of SNS. In this research, we identify a selfdisclosure as a driving factor for initiating and maintaining online social relationships. This research assumes that the self-disclose strategy adopted by participants in a communication process would be very similar between a face to face communication and a communication through SNS. In addition, this study explores that how the strength of social relationship does affects participants’ self-discloser strategy in SNS. Self-disclosure on SNS is multidimensional and it consists of five dimensions; intent to disclose, amount, the positive-negative nature, the honesty-accuracy, and general depth-control of disclosure. Our research indicates that strength of relationship affect negatively the amount of disclosure on SNS. SNS users, in other words, less reveal themselves in terms of both frequency and duration to other user in strong tie than in weak tie. We found that strength of social ties significantly influenced dimensions of self-disclosure except for the positive-negative nature of disclosure.