Social Anxiety, Motivation, Self-Disclosure, and Computer-Mediated Friendship

This study aims to investigate the mechanisms of individuals’ social interaction with new and existing friends in the blogosphere. It examines not only the direct association between social anxiety and online friendships but also the mediating effects of motivation and self-disclosure on the relation through path analysis. A total of 385 bloggers recruited online responded to the survey questionnaire. The results showed that compared with low socially anxious individuals, those with high social anxiety tended to make fewer new friends, communicated with fewer existing friends via blogs, and had lower relationship quality with those existing friends, but had higher relationship quality with new friends made through blogs. With regard to mediation, the higher the bloggers’ social anxiety, the more motivated they were to make new friends via blogs and the more intimate information they disclosed on their blogs, both of which were, in turn, associated with more new friends and higher quality of new friendships. Interpretations of the findings and implications for understanding the social use of the Internet, especially the competing social compensation hypothesis and rich-get-richer hypothesis, are discussed.

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