The effects of social networking site use on the adjustment process of international high-school exchange students
Hannes Hesse, May 2007
This paper explores the use of social networking sites among international exchange students in the United States. Based on the premise that adjustment to the host culture is essential for the learning experience of an exchange year, in which ways does communicating with peers at home and in the host culture over these sites contribute to or lessen the value of intercultural learning by influencing the adjustment process? It looks at existing theories about the relationship between adjustment and communication and proposes a notion of social networking sites as a tool to reduce uncertainty in interpersonal communication.
Long-term International High School Student Exchange
This paper is mainly concerned with the effects of social network site use on long-term exchange of high school students. This form of student exchange came into being in the early 1950s, initially as part of broader reeducation programs in Germany sponsored by the U.S. Government to support the development of a democratic society after World War II. After the official sponsorship ended, some exchange programs were continued through the efforts of private organizations. Programs with other countries were established, and today, over 25,000 students from over 100 countries spend an academic year in the United States while living in a host family (Lee, 2007).
The goals and motivations for student exchange are manifold. Program facilitators typically think of their programs as a contribution to mutual understanding among peoples, leading to a more peaceful world. On a more personal level, facilitators and participants often hope for “an increased internationalist orientation, an enhanced knowledge of the world, greater maturity and interpersonal skills, and an overall reluctance to perpetuate stereotypes and distortions of other cultures“ (Detweiler, 1984).
To achieve these goals, practitioners have long identified the important role of the participant’s adjustment to the host culture, and integrated conveying this importance into their orientation work prior to exchange programs. Because research on high school student exchange programs is scarce, this assumption largely rests on more general research about cross-cultural adaptation or adjustment. Most of this research was either conducted in the context of immigrants in the United States or in the context of studying the behavior of international university students and professional sojourners. Besides the notion by practitioners that adjustment to the host culture is the key to understanding a culture in depth, literature often describes adjustment as a goal itself, defining it as the “process […] of becoming functional in a new country” (Pitts, 2005), or a as a “function of effective intercultural communication which occurs between sojourner and host” (David et.al., 1971). Much of the literature on this subject uses the terms “adaptation”, “adjustment” and “acculturation” synonymously. This paper will use the term “adjustment,” described by Pitts (2005) as a “dynamic state of becoming” and making behavioral and mental modifications while abroad.
Adjustment can be more than a simple imitation of the behavior of host country natives. It can also be described as having cognitive aspects. Some researchers imply that a successful adjustment process encompasses a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a culture and its subtleties (e.g. David et.al., 1971). Kim (1978) proposes to define acculturation as “the process of cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral adaptation to the new cultural system, rather than as the process of adopting the cultural values of a new society.”
The process of adjustment is often described as having an “U-curve” shape, although this curve better describes the emotional state and contentness with living in the host culture than the actual state of adjustment in the sense of acting in accord with and perceptually understanding the culture. The curve can be divided into four distinct phases (Lysgaard, 1955): During the initial phase, the sojourner is mainly a spectator who observes the new culture with enthusiasm and is greeted with interest. After this first phase of an emotional “high,” the demands to adjust to the new environment increase, everyday life sets in, and the inability to make sense of the complex observations and to establish enduring social relationships creates a state of disillusionment and fatigue, sometimes referred to as “culture shock” (Oberg, 1960) and often accompanied by an increased sense of hostility towards the host environment. In the third phase, the sojourner becomes more proficient in understanding the subtle cultural cues of the host environment, reaches a level of fluency in the host language, and develops strategies of dealing with intercultural difficulties. A final stage can be described as “integration,” where one becomes fully comfortable in the host environment while acknowledging one’s own cultural heritage.
Adjustment and Communication
As Yang et.al. (1991) note, living in a new culture always involves learning to live with a certain amount of unfamiliarity and uncertainty. When viewing adjustment at least partly as a cognitive process, a central part of this process will involve reaching a higher competency in interpreting observations and predicting the consequences of actions in the host culture. In this light, adjustment can also be seen as the effort to reduce uncertainty about other people and the surrounding.
Besides improving general language skills, Yang et.al. have identified the use of mass media as one strategy to reduce this uncertainty by learning more about the culture. They argue that this is so because mass media does more than just transmitting information about current events or provide entertainment – it conveys a society’s values, norms and traditions. It should be noted that the use of mass media comes at a relatively low cost, compared to interpersonal communication. Though some language skills are required to understand its content, it is not necessary for the visitor to engage in dialogue or act in accordance with cultural norms. Therefore, Yang et.al. argue, newcomers are likely to turn to this source of information, and show that this is especially true for newcomers with a strong perceived need or motivation to adjust.
In a study among Korean immigrants in Chicago, Kim (1978) explores the adjustment process from a communication perspective. She distinguishes four different types of communication: Host mass communication (mass media from the host culture), ethnic mass communication (e.g. Korean-language newspapers, either in the U.S. or in Korea), host interpersonal communication (direct interaction between immigrants and members of the host society) and ethnic interpersonal communication (e.g. communication with other members of the Korean community in the same city). She confirms previous findings that engaging in host mass communication facilitates adjustment by raising the perceptual complexity and fostering a positive attitude towards the host society, while ethnic mass communication usually does the opposite. Host interpersonal communication has the strongest effect on the adjustment process, suggesting that “interpersonal communication is a more powerful source of cultural learning” than mass media. The effect of ethnic interpersonal communication on adjustment is less clear. Contradicting traditional assumptions, Kim found that immigrants who communicated intensely within their ethnic community also tended to engage more in host interpersonal communication.
It should be noted that the correlations between adjustment and communication behavior do not necessarily represent a unidirectional causality. While the choice of communication partners and networks likely has an effect on the adjustment process, it is also a product of the existing motivation to adjust and attitude towards the host culture.
New Media
With the advent of Internet-based communication, the previously well-defined lines between interpersonal and mass communication tend to blur. Internet users typically engage in both kinds of communication over the same medium, for example by communicating over e-mail or instant messaging while watching video content or reading news online. Newer, more interactive forms of Internet content like blogs and social networking sites (SNS) weaken the distinction between mass-published content and point-to-point communication even more.
Youth exchange practitioners have been alarmed by the new possibilities for students to communicate with members of their home culture while abroad. Much of this concern comes from the comparison of today’s communication landscape with that of the 1970s, when an overseas phone call cost several dollars per minute, and communication with home was almost exclusively limited to sending and receiving letters. While acknowledging some benefits of being able to share the exchange experience more directly with friends and family, they fear that cheap synchronous communication, like telephony or chat, increasingly disturbs the adjustment process and hinders students from independently forming their own interpretations and judgments about the host culture. In addition, they fear that an increased online presence of exchange students limits their chances to engage with members of the host culture directly on an interpersonal level. It is sometimes neglected that exchange students increasingly rely on the use of new media to establish and maintain contacts with members of the host culture. It may, for example, be more difficult to participate fully in the social scene of a high school without access to the appropriate communications technology, like cell phones or internet.
The widespread use of social networking sites seems to become an integral part of today’s communication behaviors among teenagers, and many exchange students participate in this communication just like their peers.
Social Networking Sites and Exchange Students
According to a recent survey (Lenhart, 2007), 55% percent of American teenagers between 12 and 17 years old use social networking sites. The vast majority of these say they mostly use MySpace, some reported maintaining a profile on Facebook. Half of them visit social networking sites at least once a day. Almost all respondents (91%) indicated they use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends they see a lot, while 81% say, they also use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see. Almost half (49%) of the respondents reported they use social networking sites to make new friends.
While no comparable data is available about social networking site use in other countries, or among exchange students, anecdotal evidence suggests that exchange students use these tools in a similar fashion, both to communicate with their host environments and to stay in touch with friends back home. In addition, many exchange students seem to use social networking sites to connect with other exchange students, whom they have met during orientation seminars or similar occasions. When browsing through user comments on MySpace profile pages of international exchange students, one can often identify all three of these different types of communication over the same medium.
It is worth investigating the individual motivations for these different kinds of communication. Because of the limited length of their stay abroad, exchange students have a natural interest in maintaining contact with their friends, both to process experiences made abroad, and to stay informed about changes in friends’ lives and make interaction with them smoother upon return. Much of this communication could be classified as diversion or entertainment and is not directly related to the hosting culture.
A special form of communication is networking with other exchange students. While the these interpersonal relationships may be based on as few as one real-life encounter (such as attending a pre-departure orientation seminar together), exchange students often feel a sense of common ground due to their similar situations of being new to a largely unknown culture. This shared experience opens a wide field of both informal and substantial conversation topics, and the barrier of communicating about adjustment problems with other exchange students may be lower than with peers from either the host or the home culture.
Finally, exchange students – especially in the first weeks and months upon arrival –typically meet many new acquaintances and need to develop strategies to turn some of these acquaintances into more permanent relationships or friendships. Social networking sites could support this process, as this paper shows.
Interpersonal Communication and Uncertainty
Berger and Calabrese (1975) explore the early stages of interpersonal communication and formulate a communication model based on uncertainty reduction. They note that many interaction situations are characterized by an initial “entry phase,” which consists of an often symmetric exchange of largely biographical information. It is often followed by an exploration of each other’s attitudes and opinions.
It is followed by a “personal phase,” during which the participants communicate over basic values and personal matters or problems. This phase does not typically occur until a somewhat advanced stage of a relationship. Communication in the personal phase is often more spontaneous and less constrained by norms of social desirability.
They describe the final phase of an interaction situation as the “exit stage,” where the participants make plans and negotiate future interactions. The exit phase tends to be more formal and guided by verbal or non-verbal behaviors to signal the end of an encounter.
Berger and Calabrese develop a theory based on the assumption that the primary concern of initial communication among strangers is to reduce uncertainty about their own and the other’s behavior. This means gathering information about the other participant in order to better predict their future behavior, as well as retroactively explain previous actions. Based on this knowledge, the participant will also choose among several possible response alternatives the one which seems most appropriate under the given circumstances and is likely to prompt the desired reaction from the communication partner.
This assumption is partly based on the notion that humans constantly strive to explain the world around them in terms of causalities and try to predict future events by gathering information. They formulate as an axiom that any communication between two humans decreases the level of uncertainty for each interactant in the relationship. They also noted that the amount of verbal communication in turn depends on the uncertainty level about each other, and thus establish a reciprocal causal relationship between verbal communication and the level of uncertainty reduction. This is consistent with the everyday observation that we tend to communicate more with those whom we know better.
They also note that one can derive clues about the other party from the environment in which the interaction is set. As an example, they predict that two strangers who meet at a political rally are more likely to engage in a conversation about personal political values than if these strangers met in a different venue, because the situation itself reduces the uncertainty level.
Because the level of uncertainty is relatively high in the early stage of a relationship, this phase is characterized by a high level of information-seeking or question-asking behavior. They predict that as relationships mature, the number of questions asked declines.
Referring to Goffman (1959), Berger and Calabrese note that it is usually a person’s interest to have smoothly running interpersonal relationships. They predict that one will usually avoid negative turns in an interaction by only advancing to conversation about more intimate topics such as beliefs and values if it is one’s perception that sufficient similarities exist along these crucial issues. They note that these perceptions are often made based on biographical and demographic information learned at an early stage of the interaction. Drawing from general theories about homophily, they find that individuals are more likely to interact with others who are similar along one or several axes of importance. They connect this to their uncertainty theory by noting that similarity itself brings about a reduction of uncertainty about the other party.
Finally, they note that an early stage of interaction often bears a high level of reciprocity in information exchange. This could be explained with general communication norms of no one party wanting to dominate the conversation, but also with the mutual interest of no one party gaining more information power over the other. Early interactions therefore often equally consist of “giving and taking.”
Social Networking Sites as Tools for Uncertainty Reduction
Berger’s and Calabrese’s theory of uncertainty in interpersonal relations offers a framework for explaining the attractiveness of social networking sites in general, and their role for exchange students in particular.
A major component of the use of social networking sites is to browse other people’s profile pages. These typically provide general biographical information (age, location), photos, statements about one’s views and interests as well as a detailed description of the person’s social environment through friend lists and comments or guestbook entries. In addition, some social networking site users provide more narrative information about their lives by maintaining weblogs embedded in their profiles.
This wealth of accessible information about other persons is in many ways comparable with the information-seeking parts of the initial phase of interpersonal communication. Though not inherently symmetrical or even bidirectional at all, browsing profiles of schoolmates reveals a great deal of the social fabric of an exchange student’s surroundings and gives insight into the backgrounds of their peers. In extreme cases, a visitor will know details about another person’s life without ever previously having talked to the person.
In addition to explicit information provided on profile pages, one can infer assumptions about a person’s attitudes and interests by analyzing context information such as which peers the person is connected with, which school, church, or clubs the person belongs to and much more. Following Berger’s and Calabrese’s theory, all this information reduces uncertainty about the other person and has the potential to help explain and predict the person’s behavior.
Some social networking sites provide search functionality based on lexical descriptions of interests, attitudes, and biographical factors, such as age and location. Following the aforementioned tendency to homophily in interpersonal relations, exchange students could use these facilities to find peers in their surroundings who are similar in certain regards and pursue real-life interactions with them.
The availability of this information – often in a structured, verbalized way, and sometimes limited to pre-set choices (such as political views and body type along one axis in Facebook and MySpace, respectively) – comes with the danger of distorting the traditional ways of choosing interaction partners and giving undue weight to explicitly stated factors over more subtle personality traits not described in online profiles. Social networking sites also do not typically provide strategies how to transform interests developed in another person into a real-life interaction.
Because there typically is no sequential process of “finding out about people online” and then meeting them in real life [1], the role of social networking sites in the process of finding friends should be seen as an assistance, rather than a replacement. The value of SNS use should therefore be seen in augmenting the process of getting to know another person and reducing uncertainty in this phase.
A social setting such as a high school offers an abundance of repeated informal encounters with the same persons. However, exchange students often report they have difficulties building upon these interactions and transforming them into more lasting relationships. In addition to potentially giving visitors knowledge how to approach specific individuals based on background information, many social networking sites afford certain types of nonverbal behavior, albeit different from traditional nonverbal communication. For example, some sites feature functionality to see who has viewed one’s profile page. This computer-mediated way of seeing and being seen can be used a low-cost, low-barrier way of signaling someone an interest or possible desire for communication. Another, more explicit example for the emulation of nonverbal communication by social networking sites is Facebook’s “poke” feature – which essentially sends an empty message to the other party along with the offer to “poke back.”
Reciprocity is handled in different ways by different sites. While MySpace profile pages are by default publicly browsable, Facebook limits viewing profiles to registered users. Both sites offer privacy settings with which users can define who can see their profile pages. Over half (59%) of surveyed teenagers say, they have limited their profile, so that only their friends can see it (Lenhart, 2007). While this fact limits the aforementioned ability to browse around and gather information about others, it reinforces the traditional convention of reciprocity in interpersonal relations. Presumably, teenagers who restrict the audience of their profile pages to friends, expect a balanced process of disclosing personal information and seeking information about others. While this reciprocity raises the need and expectation for visitors to create profiles and provide information about them, it also in many cases adds the need to step forward and request a formal “friendship” status with others to advance the relationship. Depending on the exchange student’s personality and cultural background, this can act either as a catalyst or as a barrier to interacting with others online. This is likely influenced by factors such as the visitor’s perception of what it means to “be friends” with someone in the host culture, by the definition of friendship in one’s original cultural context [2], and whether the visitor perceives the “barrier to friendship” equally high or lower online compared to real life.
Social networking sites typically afford further development of online relationships by providing tools such as comment functions on photos and guestbooks and sending private messages. This interaction seems to come at a lower perceived cost than e.g. sending someone an email message or calling them over the phone. It can be speculated whether this is due to a lower degree of formality compared to email, or simply because it is a social norm among teenagers to communicate over SNS-based instant messages (see e.g. boyd, 2006).
Because of the overall informal and asynchronous nature of communication over social networking sites, this form of interaction also bears some features deemed relevant for the “exit stage” of interpersonal communication, though in a different fashion than in face-to-face communication. Where real-life encounters typically include some form of negotiation about the future of the relationship (such as when the parties are going to interact the next time), SNS-based interaction often lacks this kind of commitment. Social networking sites therefore not only lower the barrier to entry into interaction with another person, but also lowers the barrier to discontinuing this interaction by not writing back. One might argue that this low-commitment characteristic contributes to overall lowering the cost of interacting with others through social networking sites.
Social Networking Sites and the Adjustment Process
Based on the theories and observations presented above, the use of social networking sites by exchange students shapes their adjustment process to the host culture in several ways. Since exchange students use social networking sites to communicate with different groups, it is worth considering these separately.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that most exchange students who use social networking sites, at least partly use them to stay connected with friends back home and to network with other exchange students. The advantages are obvious. Browsing friends’ profile pages is a relatively easy, low-cost way to stay informed about changes in their lives as well as about life at home in general, provided that these friends update their profiles, keep up weblogs or upload photos of activities. In addition, social networking sites afford direct communication through private messages or guestbook and photo comments. Whether this increased – and presumably “richer” communication, compared to e.g. email correspondence – has a negative effect on exchange students’ adjustment to their host culture, is difficult to determine and depends on the interpretation of existing research on the effects of intraethnic communication on adjustment. For example, Shah (1991) finds some evidence in support of the thesis that ethnic communication slows down the adjustment process, while the aforementioned study by Kim (1978) does not support this view (Kim explains this with “structural pluralism”).
Aside from general concern about the effects of ethnic communication or too close contact with home, engaging in online communication – whether with members of one’s own culture or the host culture – is costly, and time spent in front of the computer is time not spent in direct interaction with the host environment. International youth exchange is founded on the idea that long-term personal interaction among members of different cultures provides learning opportunities whose depth could not be achieved by reading books or watching films about that culture. One can presumably exclude purely online interactions from achieving these learning effects, as well, or youth exchange could be replaced by online penpal programs.
However, when viewing the use of social networking sites not as a replacement of personal interaction, but as a form of “augmented reality,” this medium could well help exchange students understand their environments and initiate and deepen contact to members of their host culture. Student exchange is inherently a situation of high uncertainty about the meanings of observations and people’s behaviors. Exchange visitors will gladly use whatever information they can get to make sense of their surroundings and form models of the culture they live in. At the risk of not always accurately representing real-life persons and relationships, social networking sites add an accessible layer of information about the social fabric of schools and peer groups.
In the light of interpersonal communication as an uncertainty-reduction process, social networking sites promise to support the formation of real-life relationships by lowering the barrier to interacting with others, reducing uncertainty in the initial phase and facilitating an ongoing interaction through low-cost communication features.
Whether this prediction holds true in reality, and whether facilitated communication with peers in the host culture outweighs the presumably negative effects of being too closely connected to the home culture, further research must show. While it is unlikely that exchange students will refrain from using social networking sites because of theoretical considerations, most students intuitively realize that there is a tradeoff between online and real-life presence and ultimately must decide for themselves how to use new media. This paper frames the use of social networking sites as a way of reducing uncertainty in an environment with many unknown variables, and suggests that further qualitative or quantitative investigation about the perceived effects of this communication behavior be undertaken.
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[1] Although almost half of surveyed teenagers stated they use social networking sites to “make friends”. How exactly they go about this, the survey leaves unclear (Lenhart, 2007).
[2] German exchange students often report they are frustrated by how relatively soon Americans consider someone a friend, but then not live up to their expectations of a friendship. This is likely due to a differently defined concept of friendship; someone considered a “friend“ in the English-speaking world may be considered merely an “acquaintance” in some European countries.