Page 14 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.”
- Facebook, 2017
The mission statement above published on the company’s website encapsulates the goals of Facebook, a social network site (SNS). SNSs are one of the several forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC)1 that became increasingly popular in recent years (“Social Media Statistics”, 2018). Since its public inception in 2006, Facebook has become a big commercial success (Press, 2018). It has diversified from simply being a network communication channel to an advertising platform and, controversially, a big data vendor (Monnappa, 2018; Singer, 2018). Despite ethical concerns and actual privacy risks for its users, Facebook remains the most popular and most regularly-used SNS worldwide (Ahmad, 2019; Smith & Anderson, 2018; “Social Media Statistics”, 2018). Consistent with Facebook’s publicly-declared mission, its users still value the platform primarily for networking and messaging purposes (Ahmad, 2019).
Although Facebook’s mission statement is meant for everyone who uses the platform, the specific goals mentioned -- such as building community, bringing the world closer together, staying connected with family and friends -- could be particularly relevant to international sojourners. International sojourners are individuals who leave their home country “to achieve a particular goal or objective with the expectation that they will return to their country of origin after the purpose of their travel has been achieved” (Safdar & Berno, 2016, p. 173). Despite the prospect of achieving important personal goals in the host country, the experience of sojourn entails leaving behind the familiarity of home and being separated from family and friends. Facebook’s mission statement reflects international sojourners’ hopes that with communication technology such as SNSs, sojourners may still feel close to family and friends, and home may seem never too far away.
While abroad, it is important for sojourners that their communication and social interactions help them accomplish two concurrent social goals: The maintenance of existing, meaningful relationships from home, and the establishment
1 In this dissertation, CMC is defined based on the common understanding as multi-modal communication that takes place between humans via the Internet (Herring, 2005).
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