Correlation of Affiliation Needs with Intensity of Using Facebook in Young Adulthood

Abstract

1.IntroductionThe internet has emerged as one of the most popular communication media for all ages and is the most widely used tool for socializing at the moment. Bargh and McKenna (2004) state that communicating with others via the internet can help maintain close relationships with family and friends. Internet-based communication is also called Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) (Thurlow et al., 2004).Currently, many online media companies promote CMC, as a form of social media to the general public, such as Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, MSN, Friendster, My Space, Facebook, Kaskus, CNN, Gmail, MIRC, Wikipedia, Twitter and others. One example of this form of social media communication or CMC that has become very popular today worldwide, is the social networking site, Facebook. Facebook was designed by Mark Zuckerberg to keep in touch with fellow students in Harvard University in 2004 (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). The advent of Facebook recorded 21 million users (Needham & Company, 2007). In Indonesia, as much as 47.96182 million people use Facebook, making Indonesia among the top four countries in the world to most frequently use Facebook with the percentage of males at 59.1% (28.42646 million users) and 40.9% of women (19.68732 million users) (www.checkfacebook.com).Research conducted by Subrahmanyam, Reich, Waechter, and Espinoza (2008) states that today, many adults are starting to use social networks to build intimacy and fulfill affiliation needs by connecting, and reconnecting with friends and family members. This tendency is reinforced by social networking sites such as Facebook often requiring users to create web pages containing information about themselves and information that want to share with other people (Clark & Roberts, 2010). By uploading information, both current and past about themselves, they create a "space" for themselves where they find validation by other like-minded people.Survey results of studies undertaken by several universities in the US Midwest found that 91% of participants used the website facebook.com (Wiley & Sisson, 2006). This shows that prevalence of CMC via Facebook among the general population. Spending time on social networking sites has become so much a part of daily activities among mostly young adults. According to a survey by Nielsen Telecom Practice (Kristo, 2011), five of the most widely performed activities by Facebook users in Indonesia are; sending messages to friends as much as 91%; profile editing as much as 91%; exploring a friend or stranger's profile as much as 86%; updating their status or uploading something on the wall as much as 84%; and uploading photos as much as 79%. The ease of use facilitates such activities and leads to its users using the internet to open Facebook almost every day.Facebook has become a part and parcel of everyday life for most people. Williams and Skoric (2007) have studied the tendency of using Facebook and found that a high tendency to use Facebook is associated with age, gender, consumption patterns, behaviors, and relationships between individuals. Through Facebook, people can find out almost everything about a person like the name, date of birth, facial image, address, occupation, and many other personal details like schools studied in, favourite movies and books and so.The high level of usage of Facebook is caused by certain motivations. The first is the reception by a group of "friends" or fellow users, and the second is interpersonal feedback (comments) to the user himself, where when one gets comments from others about what was said on Facebook, the person will reply to these comments and so on, causing the intensity of the individual using the Facebook to increase (Simatupang, 2011). Facebook utilization refers to the level of intensity of engaging in the various activities in Facebook with more time being spent by the individual on these activities.Intensity refers to the frequence of performing a certain activity which is usually based on a sense of fun and enjoyment that comes when engaging in such activities. …