Abstract
Abstract A cross-cultural comparison of social networking friendship between MySpace (in USA) and Wretch (in Taiwan) was conducted utilizing the high- and low-context framework proposed by Edward T. Hall (1976). Three network indicators were used to describe the network structure of both social network sites: size, density, and heterogeneity. Data were drawn from the forum “Jobs, Work, Careers” on MySpace and “Job-Related” on Wretch over a 2-month period from mid-October to mid-December in 2007. For each of the 2 sites, 6 users (3 men and 3 women) were randomly selected as sources or “seeds” from which to crawl the friendship networks. From the 6 seed users, a snowball sample was constructed by crawling 2 degrees out along the networks. The results indicated that Wretch, although it followed the expected direction predicted by Hall’s model, did not have significantly larger and denser networks than MySpace. Finally, no differences in same-sex and cross-sex friendships were found between the 2 sites either. The overall findings are discussed with implications for future studies.
Highlights
A cross-cultural comparison of social networking friendship between MySpace and Wretch was conducted utilizing the high- and low-context framework proposed by Edward T
The goal of the present study is to examine the network structures of the visible network of social networking friendships (Thelwall, 2008)
Since network structure may vary from culture to culture (Wellman & Gulia, 1999), the present study examines it in the context of cross-cultural comparisons to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of SNSs
Summary
A cross-cultural comparison of social networking friendship between MySpace (in USA) and Wretch (in Taiwan) was conducted utilizing the high- and low-context framework proposed by Edward T. Since network structure may vary from culture to culture (Wellman & Gulia, 1999), the present study examines it in the context of cross-cultural comparisons to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of SNSs. Using Hall’s (1976) high- and low-context model of culture as a conceptual framework, this study compares the networking patterns of two countries, Taiwan and the USA—one from the East and one from the West. MySpace and Wretch, two of the popular SNSs in the USA and Taiwan respectively, were selected as the research sites for the present study. For each of the two sites, six “seed” users were randomly selected to “crawl” two degrees out along the friendship networks (Herring et al, 2005)
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