Aaron Caldwell
Executive summary:
To gather data for my research on how social networking is used to maintain relationships I used a focus group, several interviews and an online survey. My research question was how do people use social networking to maintain relationships? My hypothesis is that people use social networking to broadcast background details to provide context to other communication about their lives. My data suggests that how people use social networking to maintain their relationships is through context control. This means not only are people using social networking sites to broadcast details about their lives to provide context to others, but they are manipulating the context we view them in.