Does social media really tighten interpersonal bonds?

This semester, 17 students tackled that question and more in a new class, “Social Networking Sites and Personal Relationships,” taught by Andrew Ledbetter, assistant professor of communication studies in the College of Communication.

“I really want students to understand the historical perspective,” he says. “So the first half of the class we go through the history of computer-aided technology and, even before that, from telephone and telephone etiquette from the early part of the 20th century to how delivered mail was used to build morale in World War II.”

Ledbetter earned his undergraduate degree in communications and computer science at Wheaton College in 2002 then went on to graduate school at the University of Kansas where he researched email communications. By the time he tackled his doctoral dissertation, social media sites such as MySpace were on the rise, so he broadened his research with the evolving technologies.

“The focus I take on my research and in teaching is how we use social media to maintain our relationships and how it is changing how we maintain our relationships,” he adds.

Ledbetter’s research shows that social media can actually enhance a relationship. He says that a person’s attitudes about online communications influences the likelihood that person will communicate with a particular friend, and in turn, how close they feel to that friend.

The results were published in a recent edition of Communication Research.

“Facebook added to the closeness of that friendship above and beyond how they communicate offline,” he says. “So we kick around the idea of Facebook being just a big time waste — does it really improve our relationships? — and there seems to be limited evidence that maybe it can.”

One of the challenges in teaching a class on social media is that the field is constantly shifting as new technologies emerge.

“When I wrote the syllabus, Google+ hadn’t even come out,” he says. “Sometimes I have to go in and say, ‘There’s this big news story today, so we really should talk about it.’ ”

The two major assignments of the class involve both looking back and looking forward. Students do class presentations examining past technologies, such as Internet Chat Relay, an early precursor to Twitter, and the instant messenger feature on AOL, previously known as America Online.

“Sometimes I’ll see nostalgia,” Ledbetter says. “Students will say, ‘I remember AOL, I was in middle school and I’d go home and IM my friends.’ It’s almost this wistfulness. For them, it was part of their childhood.”

The second assignment is a position paper where students debate the good and bad aspects of a certain type of social media.

“I ask them to reflect and think about the nature of the technology and how we use it,” Ledbetter says. “I want them to come to a more reflective understanding of the technology.”