Page 21 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

and communication technologies in the past years, the opportunities of social interactions have expanded. CMC has provided possibilities of maintaining social relationships beyond geographic locations and temporal boundaries (Hiller & Franz, 2004). The notion of an uprooted migrant has given way to the concept of a connected migrant (Diminescu, 2008). One of the anticipated implications of CMC use among sojourners is that being away from home no longer meant the severance of ties from existing social networks. Moreover, CMC use meant greater opportunities for strengthening new networks with the members of the host environment (Dekker & Engbersen, 2014). In this dissertation, I am using “networks” (i.e., host- and home-country networks) to collectively refer to international students’ significant social relationships; specifically, family, friends, and, in some cases, also a romantic partner.
A Focus on Social Network Sites (SNSs)
Among the various forms of CMC, this dissertation will focus on the use of SNSs for social interactions among international sojourners. SNSs fall under the category of social media CMC in which “user-participation, content-sharing and social networking in (semi-open) network infrastructures is central” (Dekker, Belabas, & Scholten, 2015, p. 452). Thus, as a social medium, SNSs enable users to publicize their social networks (boyd & Ellison, 2007). What is unique about SNSs compared to other social media (such as YouTube, Weblogs or forums) is that SNSs are organized around personal networks (Dekker et al., 2015). The use of SNSs is primarily for communicating with people who are already a part of one’s extended social network. SNSs use may allow users to meet new contacts but these are usually people who are already a part of their SNS contacts’ network. Also, users have a way to verify how they are connected with strangers who contact them via the list of their common friends on SNS. Furthermore, SNSs have most of the features of other forms of CMC (e.g., email, video call, instant messaging, etc.) and social media (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) in a single platform (e.g., website or app). Compared to other forms of CMC, SNSs enable private (e.g., messaging, chatting, video telephony) and public interactions (e.g., group messaging, posting), and can be used both in a synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous (with time lag) manner. In addition, they allow unobtrusive observation of other’s online activities. SNSs include both interpersonal and group interactions. The use of SNSs to communicate with their network enables sojourners to maintain geographically-close and distant relationships, and
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