Smartphones,mobile social space,and new sociality in Korea

Introduction

Smartphones, which are equipped with multimedia functions as well as calling and text messaging functions, allow us to use the Internet on the move. As they incorporate the Internet into their multimedia functions, they enable people to access various mobile social communication spaces in which existing forms of mobile communication, such as calls and text messages, coexist with forms of Internet communication such as instant messengers, emails, and social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter. They make the online space, which is now very much a part of our everyday social interactions, easily accessible wirelessly, thus making our online sociality ubiquitous. We can maintain connectivity 24/7 and access our subscribed SNSs via smartphones.

Korea Communications Commissions (2011) reported that the number of Korean smartphone subscribers was merely 470,000 in November 2009, but that this number grew to over 20 million in October 2011, after the rollout of iPhones and the subsequent smartphone boom in Korea. This means that most of Korea’s economically active population, which numbers about 25 million, uses smartphones. Along with the spread of smartphones, there has been a rapid increase in the number of users of SNSs such as Twitter and Facebook. For instance, the number of monthly Korean visitors to Twitter in November 2009, which was 606,887, had grown to 4,342,569 by July 2010 (Baek, 2010). The rapid increase in the smartphone usage rate overlapped in a timely manner with the spread of Twitter and Facebook use in Korea, and subsequently smartphones became the main device through which people were linked to these SNSs. The Korea Internet & Security Agency’s smartphone user surveys (2010, 2011) reported that from November 2010 to May 2011, among Korean smartphone users between the ages of 12 and 59, the usage rate of microblogging networks such as Twitter rose from 32.5% to 66.4% and that of “profile-based services” such as Facebook increased from 24.1% to 56.3%. The SNS usage rate via smartphones has markedly grown over the last two years. This phenomenon raises the question of how smartphones with mobility and immediate accessibility have affected the use of SNS, and what sociality and social relationships have been created and maintained by their communicative practices.

This study attempts to understand the changing mobile communication practices that have emerged owing to the close relation between the use of SNSs and mobile smartphones. Specifically, it intends to focus on the characteristics of communication modes, social interactions, and relationships in Twitter’s social spaces in Korea, which are mediated by smartphones. For this purpose, this study examines the concrete cases of 49 Korean Twitter users’ everyday practices of social interaction via their smartphones. By collecting and analyzing qualitative interview data in mid-2010, when the number of smartphone users as well as Twitter users began to markedly increase in Korea, it tries to provide a “snapshot” or an “instant history” (Evans, 2011, p. 79) of the moment when the popular experiences of mobile Twitter began to increase. This snapshot will show what kinds of communicative and relational practices have emerged through the use of Twitter via smartphones. This study will also discuss the cultural implications of these mobile social communication practices for the existing norms of Korean sociality.

Mobile social media

Mobile phones that combine connectivity with mobility allow us to communicate with people in real time beyond the constraints of time and space. People can interact with others via calls and text messages in real time regardless of how far apart they are physically. Mobile communicability creates an “ambient virtual co-presence” (Ito & Okabe, 2005) and “perpetual contact” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002), by means of which people can engage in real-time social interactions as if they are in the same place, and can maintain their contacts at all times. The “connected presence” of others in remote places via mobile phones (Licoppe & Smoreda, 2005) enables users to continue social exchanges without being physically co-present. The mobility, individuality, and immediacy of mobile phones can create a space for constant contact as well as ritual interactions such as humor, repartee, greetings, and gossip that help “the peer group and the family to form cohesive bonds in ways that were not available in the recent past” (Ling, 2008, p. 186). Mobile phones can contribute to an increase in social interactions among spatially distributed family members and acquaintances in daily life, thereby strengthening the internal group bonds of close relations. While mobile phones allow people to enlarge the scope of their social interactions beyond their immediate and physical surroundings, they are usually used as a tool to intensify social interactions with intimates and acquaintances and thereby reinforce close relations with them.

When mobile phones incorporate the Internet as part of their multimedia functions and make it easy to access online social media such as SNSs on the move, they provide a new mobile communication condition whereby people can move across diverse communication channels from phone calls and text messages to SNSs seamlessly. Smartphones allow people to extend their mobile communicability to the online social space, reconfiguring the forms and scopes of mobile communication practices and thereby the conditions of people’s sociality. As they can serve as a connecting point to the online social space, they may affect the ways of experiencing online social interactions and relationships. To understand to what extent the mobile accessibility to the online social space shape has an impact on its communicative and relational practices, it is necessary to begin by examining the characteristics of online social communication and networking via SNS.

SNSs connect users who generate personal profiles on the sites, and thereby allow users to use various modes of communication oriented toward sociality and to build “ego-centric networks” on the Web (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Twitter is an SNS that “encourage(s) social interaction through profile-based user accounts” (Keenan & Shiri, 2009, p. 439). Unlike other SNSs such as Facebook that usually takes close and offline relations as a part of its online connection, it enables people to broaden their social networks through its following-follower system. Twitter allows people to post and share 140-character-length short texts, or “tweets,” for their “followers,” and, at the same, to read texts posted by those people to whom they are subscribing to or “following.”

Twitter seems to provide an asymmetrical and one-to-many mode of communication through which people can rapidly disseminate their messages to the semi-public or the public. In particular, the tweet-relaying mechanism “retweet” makes Twitter a medium for information dissemination (Bruns & Burgess, 2011). It can work as a many-to-one or one-to-many communication environment for large-scale information sharing and dissemination, and yet, it can also serve as a medium of conversation. Honeycutt and Herring (2009) noted that the “@” sign can be used to relate one tweet to another and thus enable coherent and longer conversations with multiple participants. Even the use of retweets can function as “a form of endorsement” for the originating user (Bruns & Burgess, 2011, p. 4) and help people participate in a “diffuse conversation” and thus “to loosely inhabit a multiplicity of conversational contexts at once” (Boyd, Golder, & Lotan, 2010). Twitter allows users to not only broadcast their messages but also to have multi-conversational contexts from one-to-one to many-to-many.

Based on the communication modes of Twitter as a conversational and broadcasting medium, Twitter can be used not only for informational purposes such as sharing information or URLs and reporting news but also for social purposes such as daily chatting and conversations (Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007). Twitter can be used for collaborative work by “enhancing information sharing, building common ground, and sustaining a feeling of connectedness among colleagues” (Zhao & Rosson, 2009, p. 243). “Informers” who post messages mainly to share information on Twitter tend to be conversational and seek social interactions (Naaman, Boase, & Lai, 2010). Such uses of Twitter for both informational and social purposes can also be found in Korea. Shim and Hwang found that Twitter is mostly used in Korea for “social participation by exchanging information,” “formation of follower groups based on social interactions,” “convenient communication tool,” and “ease of transferring information” (Shim & Hwang, 2010, p. 218).

In Twitter’s communication space people can easily create and expand social connections, and they can also share everyday life experiences and information with others they are networked with. However, the communicative structure of Twitter has a low level of reciprocity in which a user can follow any other user and the user being followed does not need to follow back; this makes its online relationship “fragile” and easily breakable (Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010). Moreover, due to its scalable connectivity, “the imagined audiences” for tweets tend to be heterogeneous; they can include offline friends and colleagues, to strangers and even celebrities, and thus, diverse social contexts can coexist and are collapsed into one (Marwick & Boyd, 2011). Marwick and Boyd argue that individuals can face conflicts between “the desire to have ‘fans’ or a ‘personal brand’” and “the desire for pure self-expression and intimate connections with others,” and have to combine their public-facing and interpersonal interactions (2011, p. 17). Users can be put in multiple communication contexts where they have to keep in mind diverse imagined audiences simultaneously and have parasocial interactions, like celebrities, with their fans. The coexistence of diverse social contexts and the accompanying concerns of privacy raise the question of how Twitter uses can create and maintain sociality and social relationships.

Smartphones allow people to access Twitter anytime and anywhere. Contrary to the fixed Internet, through which people stay still in front of monitors and move around only in the online space, smartphones enable double mobility, that is, physical as well as virtual mobility. On the one hand, the mobile connectivity of smartphones provides people ubiquitous and immediate accessibility to Twitter. On the other hand, physical mobility can constitute a context for their Twitter use. Smartphones allow people to post personal updates and read others’ posts in real time, and thus, they can intensify “a virtual feeling of proximity” through Twitter use (Zhao & Rosson, 2009, p. 244). Humphreys’ case study of Dodgeball (2008) indicates that the use of mobile phones to post messages in real time can “accelerate the exchange of social-location information” and “contribute to users feeling socially connected to their network of friends and part of the social molecularization just by knowing what goes on.” Mobile phones allow users to constantly eavesdrop on other users’ messages and to thereby have a sense of “looser” sociality in which people have casual interactions and fun without social burdens that intimate and closer relations would carry (Humphreys, 2008, p. 356).

Twitter users can post their updates in real time on the move and stay connected with their online friends through the handy and ubiquitous connectivity of smartphones. The use of mobile Twitter can be conducive to ritual interaction among users. Smartphones may help Twitter users to perpetually exchange phatic communications without substantive content, to capture trendy conversation, and to monitor and respond to others’ messages at any moment. Although Twitter provides the same function for fixed PCs and smartphones, Twitter users would have slightly different experiences depending on their entry devices. While people have to sit in front of PCs and “enter into” Twitter’s social space, smartphone users easily learn about updates through devices in their hands. As people tend to rarely let their smartphones out of their hands, to even take them to bed, and to play with them whenever they feel the urge to do so, Twitter uses via smartphones become pervasive, perpetual, and individualized. Mobile Twitter usage may enhance the sense of always being connected to its social space.

Ling (2008) describes that existing mobile phones have allowed family members and friends to enjoy full-time connectedness to and ritual interactions with one another, and consequently, they have helped to reinforce social bonds in close relations. The frequent exchanges of humor and greetings via text messages could strengthen social bonds, not because of their content but because of their assurance of being connected. Then, would such mobile phone effects occur in mobile Twitter uses? Smartphones’ mobility and pervasive usability can affect the ways of accessing and staying connected to Twitter’s social space, and they thereby may have an impact on the ways of experiencing its sociality and relationships. Asymmetrical exchanges of information, phatic communication, and broader conversations with imagined audiences can be done in pervasive, perpetual, and individualized ways. Based on Ling’s study on mobile communicative and relational practices, we can ask how the mobile connectivity of smartphones would condition mobile Twitter uses. Would smartphone usage facilitate indirect communication with networked others in different social contexts, promote ritual interactions, and create psychological proximity with them in their daily lives? How do the sociality and social bonds of mobile Twitter fit into the normative framework of existing social practices? By exploring these questions, we can have the chance to discuss the cultural implications of mobile social networking practices. These issues are examined in the following section,

Case study

This study conducted focus group interviews to understand the characteristics of communication practices and sociality through Twitter users who access social media anytime and anywhere via smartphones. Since the subject of interest was how people used Twitter for communication and social interaction via smartphones, as the number of smartphone users had markedly increased along with the boom in Twitter usage in Korea, the study recruited smartphone users who had started to use Twitter in 2009 and early 2010 and who used their smartphones mainly for Twitter. After contacting an informant with thousands of followers and asking for her help in recruiting other informants, the study used the snowball sampling method, based on these interviews. Interview participants were contacted through Twitter. Owing to this method of recruitment, the participants were “Twitter friends” or “Twitter friends’ friends,” and therefore they knew one another well through their Twitter activities.

Focus group interviews helped the researcher to “observe the interactive processes between the participants” and to listen to their experiences with little intervention in the interview process (Madriz, 2003, p. 365). Forty-nine people, ranging from teenagers to those in their forties, living in the Seoul metropolitan area, were interviewed in twos, threes, and sometimes fours, depending on their closeness with each other, from April to August 2010. Five teenage users, 18 users in their 20s, 15 users in their 30s, and 11 users in their 40s participated in these interviews; there were 17 female and 32 male interviewees. The interviewees’ occupations varied—there were students, office workers, professionals (engineers, programmers, journalists, lawyers, etc.), a marketer, and people without occupations. Although this study did not intentionally control the number of interviewees by gender and occupation, the demographic composition of the recruited interview participants reflected the general characteristics of smartphone users in Korea at the time. KT (2010), a major Korean telecommunication company, reported that men accounted for 62% of the one million iPhone users in Korea in September 2010. Those in their twenties accounted for 43%; those in their thirties, for 33%; and those in their forties, for 11%. Among interview participants, there were more men (65%) than women, and more professionals (49%) than those having any other occupations.

Each interview lasted two to three hours and was semi-structured, allowing participants to talk about their experiences with greater openness. Interview participants talked about their use of Twitter via smartphones, the characteristics of their social interactions and networking, and the meaning of mobile social networking in their everyday lives: for instance, they described how they came to use smartphones, how smartphone usage affected their mobile communicative practices, when they started to use Twitter, how mobile Twitter uses were different from those on PCs, how they communicated through mobile Twitter, who they were socially networked with via Twitter, how they interacted with Twitter friends, and what these mobile Twitter uses meant for them. All interviews were transcribed and reviewed to collate the salient experiences of most of the interviewees as well as to consider the experiential spectrum of mobile Twitter users. The analysis of the interview data followed Van Manen’s perspective of researching lived experiences (Van Manen, 1997). Rather than pre-setting the criteria for coding and categorizing themes, this study attempted to describe how interview participants experienced mobile Twitter through their own voices and to understand what these experiences meant for them. Therefore, it paid particular attention to the themes of the experiences that the interview participants were more likely to talk about. The study collected the core experiences and stories shared by many interview participants. Lastly, this study tried to convey their experiences as they were and to read them as significant cases in understanding the communication practices, sociality, and social relationships via mobile Twitter. The findings are organized into four themes. The first theme addresses what are the characteristics of communication modes via mobile Twitter, and the second theme is about how such communicative practices are conducive to social interactions and sociality. The third theme explores what kinds of social bonds can be formed through mobile Twitter uses, and the final theme discusses the cultural implications of these mobile social networking practices for Korean social norms.

A pseudo-aural space

Mobile Twitter enables users to have a near-synchronous response via smartphones. Through the mobile network connectivity that allows them to access and respond to messages in real time, they can write messages for potential conversation and tacitly expect others’ responses. Interview participants tended to consider the acts of writing and posting messages to be analogous to speaking. For instance, Yeon, a 23-year-old female interviewee, said “after having my iPhone, I have become enthusiastic about posting tweets, and have expected immediate responses.” For her, Twitter is “like a plaza where I talk with someone while I overhear and join in other people’s conversation.”

According to Ong, the material condition of oral communication mediated by sound affects the processes, expressions, and psychological dynamics of communication because sound “rides in time,” and is thus “irreversible,” situating people “in the middle of actuality and in simultaneity” (Ong 1967, p. 43, p. 128). Words conveyed by sound are events that deliver experiences of the here and now and respond to situations in real life due to their temporal and spatial orientations. Mobile Twitter’s social space tended to be experienced as a pseudo-aural space in which users got a shared sense of presence by talking and hearing what others were saying and witnessing the passing flows of collective sentiments along the timeline. Although Twitter’s textual messages were not mediated by an evanescent sound and thus interview participants could not physically hear others’ voices, they experienced mediated words as a here-and-now event. The ubiquitous and immediate accessibility to Twitter via the mobile connectivity of smartphones tended to provide them a pseudo-sense that they were placed in the middle of on-going talks.

Smartphones’ capacity for pervasive communication helped interview participants to develop a kind of “background listening” (Crawford, 2009) that enabled them to respond immediately to interesting messages and post their messages in real time. Background listening was an important condition through which they could achieve a sense of sharing the present with others who were not physically co-present by engaging in near-synchronous communication with them. Background listening was also a way for them to commit to Twitter’s social space in their daily lives and maintain full-time connectivity to it. Some interview participants actually compared their experiences of accessing and reading Twitter’s timeline to listening to the radio. For instance, Young, a 30-year-old female teacher, said “I respond to some messages as if I would respond to a song I like when I listen to the radio.”

Reading texts is an act that calls forth the past—when the author’s voice was separated from its communication context and fixed in a text—into the present of the reader’s mind (Ong, 1977, 1982). In contrast, reading tweets is likely to be perceived as listening, due to the temporal structure of tweets. They can be simultaneously accessed, and they flow along with time. As interview participants habitually glimpsed their timelines, they could stay in a virtually connected space and engage in mobile social communication with those whom they were mentally and emotionally tuned into at the time.

Through the pervasive networked connectivity of mobile Twitter, interview participants could continue to listen to the latest updates of others’ activities and concerns and talk about their news. As they were exposed to others’ words in real time and all the time and they exchanged phatic communications, they tended to become intimately connected to one another. Greetings such as “Have a good day, my Twitter friends” were not words used to deliver a specific message in expectation of others’ meaningful replies, but ritual gestures that signified interview participants’ efforts to maintain their connections in the networked space. Jang, a 44-year-old male interviewee, said “about 85% of tweets are greetings and friendly regards.” He considered mobile Twitter as an efficient tool to convey phatic messages to wide audiences. Such phatic messages often included pictures linked with tweets. People posted these messages along with temporal rhythms such as pictures of dishes at noon and a series of late-night snacks. These phatic textual and visual messages were effective not only for indicating one’s presence and full-time connectedness in Twitter’s social space but also for showing friendliness and boosting social interactions.

From random attention to “exchanging of words” to mobile intimacy

As Honeycutt and Herring (2009) have mentioned, Twitter is a noisy environment. A series of tweets with different contexts are sequentially piled up over a timeline, and tweets exchanged with a specific individual are jumbled together with other fleeting tweets. Interview participants described their exchange of tweets as an “exchanging of their words.” The notion of an exchanging of words implied that an individual paid attention to and responded to another individual’s words among a series of fragmented texts. In the mobile social space of Twitter, in which people could stay tuned to and watch over what others were doing and respond to feedback in real time, the objectified and depersonalized words of texts that separated the writer from the reader, the knower from the known, and the message from an existential context and interpretation (Ong, 1982) could regain a conversational tone. Mutual attention led to an exchanging of words, and in turn, this exchanging of words served as a foundation for emotional networks, as exemplified in the following interview.

I became hooked to Twitter because there are always people who continue to look after me in real time and give mentions to me. When I post a photograph, there is someone who gives me a word. It is fun. I couldn’t get out of it because there is always someone who gives me a mention. (Hoon, male, office worker, age 36)

Interview participants felt a sense of their own online presence and derived pleasure from other users’ feedback. By habitually checking up on Twitter via their handy smartphones, posting their updates, listening to what others say, and exchanging greetings of phatic communication, interview participants showed their curiosity and interest in both their followers and followees. They needed to be able to connect with others and establish a feeling of trust before a reciprocal and meaningful relationship could be established (Barnes, 2008). Always-being-on, real-time attention to others, co-presence mediated by words, and the occasional exchanges of words tended to create a sense of social connectedness and positive feelings toward the networked others.

In particular, interview participants often took their online social interaction to offline settings. Most interview participants experienced the so-called “Bungae” (lightning), which referred to an impromptu offline meeting. As interview participants frequently monitored other users’ messages, paid attention to what they were doing, and exchanged messages through mobile Twitter, they often had an urge to meet up. Depending on one’s physical and psychological situation, numerous offline meetings were frequently proposed on timelines. Bong, a 29-year-old male interviewee, said “after subscribing the smartphone, I have spent more time with people I got to know via Twitter” and “messages such as ‘where are you?’ or ‘come and meet us here’ are constantly pushed to my handy smartphone.” Interview participants who had created psychological proximity with other users by attentively looking over messages in their timelines were more willing to have a physical meeting. Twitter could save the initial costs or burdens of offline meetings, because online interaction and a connected presence had already made the attendees acquainted with each other. Offline meetings also served as a catalyst to facilitate more intimate dialogues on Twitter.

Moreover, interview participants often provided their location information as part of “me-now” messages about themselves (Naaman et al., 2010) in real time, and at the same time, they became aware of where others were at the moment. Various tools, such as Foursquare and other GPS functions linked with mobile Twitter that identified a real-time geographical position allowed interview participants to estimate the geographical proximity of their virtually ambient neighbors. Such geographic proximity merged with psychological proximity encouraged people to physically meet each other. Offline meetings were likely to be considered as an extension of the online exchange of words and to work as a factor that fostered continued connectedness between people.

Formation of social bonds

Traditionally, Koreans have emphasized personal connections based on school relationships, regionalism, and kinship. Personal connections, which are called “Yeonjul,” constitute an important condition for building up an individual’s social status, sustaining a group’s solidarity and fraternity, and affecting people’s social lives (Yee, 2000; Kim, 2003). The networks of Yeonjul have provided close social ties by which people within these networks are bound with unconditional personal trust, but which work as exclusive barriers for outsiders. Such personal connections have worked not only as emotional networks that provide a sense of security for people but also as instrumental networks through which people share information and sources to meet their needs. Consequently, individuals work hard to get connected to an influential Yeonjul, and they willingly participate in cultural practices such as get-togethers and after-work drinking to maintain their collective identity.

Twitter may provide individuals with a tool to widen personal networks beyond school relations, regionalism, and kinship and to share ideas and experiences through these networks. Interview participants said that they had met a variety of people of different occupations, ages, and social positions whom they could not have met in real life. Twitter allowed interview participants to integrate and expand the personal nodes of their networks. Networks could have transitivity by connecting to followers or followees, and to followers’ and followees’ followers and followees. Interview participants suggested that people would use Twitter to connect to “those whom an individual has no connection and point of contact at all.” Soo, a 40-year-old male interviewee, talked about the easy scalability of social relationships on Twitter. Even though he would occasionally face unwanted and unpleasant social interactions, he thought highly of open sociability and social connection with people with heterogeneous social backgrounds.

I come to have personal networks with people whom I haven’t known or I haven’t had connection and point of contact at all. I have no knowledge in the field of art. How can I have a chance to meet a curator? It’s interesting to broaden my experience. Although Twitter is dangerous, its greatest advantage lies in its openness. It is a good service to extend my personal networks [to those] that have no point of contact with me. (Soo, male, engineer, age 40)

According to Humphreys (2008), the looser social ties of Dodgeball are an important component of “third places” (Oldenburg, 1991) because they do not carry the same social requirements that strong ties do. These interactions can be fun and socially beneficial. Interview participants tended to show openness to the unknown others who were willing to follow and to have little hesitation with regard to making connections with them. Although these networks were not necessarily meaningful or useful, the participants expected a positive effect from such free networking. They tended to believe that the open and fluid construction of personal networks brought great potential to meet new people in a field with which they were not familiar, and that these networks offered potent personal connections that allowed one to have casual fun and access help or information in the future with little social stress.

Such extended networks via Twitter were likely to be lateral and horizontal. Interview participants tended to be intrigued by the chance that they could form social networks and have conversations with others regardless of age, occupation, and social status. For instance, Hyun, a 28-year-old male programmer, felt less intimidated by the social standing of his Twitter friends.

For instance, I would drink against my will when I was with my boss. However, since I meet people on Twitter without distinction of social standing or with an equal relationship, although there are gaps in age and social status, people are equal. That’s why offline culture is much more vitalized. (Hyun, male, programmer, age 28)

In Korea, when people meet for the first time, it is common to indicate one’s age or the year that one started college. After checking who is older and who is more senior, people behave respectfully according to order of age. There is a distinct social norm dictating that the younger person should give precedence to his or her elder. However, as the above interview illustrates, age and social status are not barriers to Twitter networking. Young people are not ignored or excluded because of their age. Unlike conventional get-togethers, where people could not help but participate in drinking rituals to maintain and reinforce their collective connection, people can enjoy meeting with other network users who demand no social requirements.

When the interview participants became intimate with people whom they knew via Twitter, they called them sister and brother, regardless of their social status and age. The participants’ active pursuit of social interactions was not driven by social pressures to make personal connections but by the pleasure of making unrestricted connections. Interview participants were attracted to Twitter’s horizontal and lateral social relations because these relations allowed individuals in different social backgrounds to get connected and to have a chance for purely emotional interactions with little social requirements. They could find comfort and consolation from these looser networks.

Quasi-strong ties and a new sense of ontological security

Twitter’s mobile social communication space might resemble an aural communication space due to its simultaneity and here-and-now-centeredness, and yet, there was a certain distance between Twitter users and their imagined audiences. While interview participants could obtain a sense of co-presence and experience real-time attention from others via networked connectivity, there was always a delay because their presence was mediated by immaterial texts. Immediate connectivity could not completely blur the invisible boundaries between the speaker and the listener or between the author and the reader. An individual could, to an extent, control the way he or she displays himself or herself and the degrees of engagement in conversation, and thereby extend his or her individualized network in such a way that one could have the pleasure of open networking and the comfort of a horizontal relationship.

Interview participants tended to mind their manners, to exchange words without violating the other user’s privacy, and to have a personal communication space that is, to some degree, detached from the real world or pre-existing social relations. Their desire for a “privately public” to make connections with many other people, while being relatively private with regard to sharing identity information (Lange, 2008, p. 372) tended to be related to a feeling of being overwhelmed with burdensome social relations in Korean society. For instance, Ji, a 28-year-old female engineer, expanded her social networks and yet tried to keep them separate from her existing social relations. On the one hand, interview participants wanted to have “open” relationships with various kinds of people with whom they could have rootless and fluid interactions beyond the social spectrum that the participants experienced in real life. On the other hand, they wished that Twitter would remain a personal space for comfort and autonomy, free from the control and interference of their existing social relationships. Their longing for a social networking space where they felt less controlled and interfered with by colleagues and acquaintances in real life, tended to be reflected in the nature of social relations on Twitter’s network. Interview participants often emphasized that social relations formed on Twitter would have neither an explicit, instrumental goal nor a collective orientation.

I draw a line toward my company, thinking that ‘company is company.’ On Twitter, I don’t want to be mixed with these kinds of people. When I am alone or [at] work, I feel like ‘a babe in the woods.’ While reading posted tweets, getting to know people, and accessing information, I have thought to myself that I am more open than others. (Ji, female, engineer, age 28)

Interview participants could build an intimate relationship in Twitter’s social communication space. Such a relationship tended to be loose and did not require a strong sense of belonging or group consciousness. Yet, such a relationship could nonetheless make interview participants experience the intimacy of strong ties in their personal connections; it seemed like a quasi-strong tie. An interview participant, a 30-year-old female student, said “Interesting enough, its relationship is seemingly shallow, and yet it is solid.” Although an individual would have a varied psychological proximity with each follower or followee, he or she could continue to speak to followers as a whole. This individualized network might not construct a community of “us” but created a loose form of communal sense within which greetings were shared, comforting words were given, and practical help was provided in case of need.

Giddens (1991) writes that it has become especially important for modern individuals to gain trust and ontological security at a time when traditional communities that used to provide security, consistency, and a sense of belonging have been dismantled. Interview participants reported experiencing a sense of ontological security in Twitter’s social space. Although an individual’s social network in this space was not a distinctive social bond and was not firm enough to be everlasting, the user could nonetheless obtain emotional support as well as practical help. When an individual felt lonely or had a hard time, he or she could get a word of kindness from somebody. Users could also seek information or help that another user would altruistically offer for nothing. As an example of such networking: When an interview participant’s father passed away, she was comforted by people with whom she had become familiar via Twitter. Several people personally came to the funeral hall and shared her sorrow. Some of them were people whom she was meeting for the first time. In Korea, the ceremonial occasion of a funeral has been conventionally taken care of by people with strong ties to the deceased’s family. Now, strangers who are only virtually connected were willing to assume the role of community members with strong ties and pray for the deceased alongside offline friends and relatives. Twitter allowed people to have versatile personal networks in which they could experience both the emotional security of strong ties and the instrumental convenience of weak ties. Through this networked space in which talk, information, and play were mixed, participants built what Naaman et al. (2010) would call “me-centered” relations that were fluid and readily responded to their emotional and instrumental needs.

Concluding remarks

Ubiquitous communication and full-time connectedness to Twitter via personal mobile media tend to reinforce the individualization of personal relationships. An individual’s personal networks on Twitter can be used and expanded to facilitate emotional sharing and information seeking and are less bound by history, place, and tradition. As people stay connected to Twitter’s social space; expose their curiosities, interests, feelings, and thoughts; and have ritual interactions with others, they can develop personal relations that link people together and cross barriers such as social status and age. Mobile Twitter may provide a communication space in which information exchanges and social communications are likely to be mixed. Although interview participants would have different motives for adopting Twitter, the site came to serve as a social networking tool through which they could obtain information during their social interactions and build intimate relationships during their exchanges of information. Thus, the motives for information-seeking and sociability were likely to be muddled. As Twitter’s communication mode is incorporated into society due to its mobility and the pervasive accessibility of smartphones, there tends to emerge an ambient social space where the boundaries between the easily expandable and instrumental relations of weak ties and the emotionally close and caring relations of strong ties are blurred. Smartphones help such a networked space to overlap seamlessly with real life and facilitate new sociability with people in diverse social contexts.

Real-time connections mean that people share a loose communal sense of the present. They also share constant contact with virtual friends, which results in psychological proximity and creates quasi-strong ties in which people feel intimacy and comfort. By staying in a mediated aural space, people can experience immediate and timely emotional support, communal feeling, and practical help that conventional strong ties cannot offer. Since this intimacy is sustained and reinforced by full-time connectivity and communicability, this intimacy is sometimes more intense than that of real-life strong ties. Heterogeneous social relations formed by the extent of ‘an exchanging of words’ and psychological proximity are vying with everyday relations in real life for the individual’s attention.

As social connections via Twitter are not merely fleeting and illusive, but can have practical meaning in real life, the individual tends to discipline himself or herself under the gaze of others. Interview participants often said, “We should be nice.” When people are increasingly joining virtual social networks, network relations become more closely tangled with offline relations, and personal words can affect a person’s reputation and relations both online and offline. The larger an individual’s network becomes, the more he or she becomes aware of the invisible audience and carefully engages in self-censorship to minimize any possible conflict or misunderstanding. In order to act on the responses of closely tied Twitter friends and, at the same time, to facilitate social interaction with a wide range of audiences, people have become cautious of the word choices that represent their presence in mobile social space. Many interview participants engaged in a social strategy of managing multi-leveled communication contexts in extended social networks. To deal with imagined audiences with different social backgrounds and contexts, they came to embody the network norms of politeness, phatic messages, perpetual attention, immediate responses, and reciprocity. At the cost of self-censorship and an obsession with constant contact and immediate response, they could enjoy a feeling of co-presence, words of acknowledgement, emotional and instrumental support, communal awareness, and thus a new sense of ontological security. Interview participants were attracted to such volatile but self-expediential networks that responded to their immediate needs.

This case study is limited to the early majority of smartphone users who were likely to take advantage of technological opportunities and mobile social media. They tended to be active users who made the most of social media-mediated smartphones. As Hargittai and Litt (2011) point out, Twitter is not universally adopted, nor is it randomly distributed among demographically different groups. Therefore, this study does not claim that its findings are necessarily representative of all Twitter uses in Korea. Rather, it provides some snapshots of how people have experienced Twitter, through their own voices. These examples of Twitter usage illustrate that its everyday use as a means for real-time information distribution leads to the shaping of new communication practices and forms of sociability, based on the 24/7 connectivity with others via smartphones.

By the end of 2010, the number of Korean Facebook visitors exceeded that of Korean Twitter visitors (Ham, 2010) and mobile messengers such as Kakaotalk began to be widely used. As people’s personal communication system has changed, so too has the meaning and relevance of mobile Twitter for social interaction and social bonds been transformed. During the by-election in October 2011 and the general election in April 2012, Twitter stood out as the newest, most vibrant election campaign tool. Twitter was treated as a public space in which political issues could be shared and discussed. The characteristics of today’s Twitter uses may differ from those in the past. Nonetheless, Twitter’s social space still constitutes a part of an individual’s hyper-sociability and exemplifies how information networks are blended with sociable ones via mobile connectivity. This research suggests that we should further explore how mobile social space responds to people’s anxiety in an age of uncertainty and limitless competition, and how it generates a culture of sociability that requires continuous self-censorship and persistent distractions for users to obtain and maintain a new sense of ontological security.