Instant Messaging, Page 3
The addition of IM to more traditional forms of communication and relational maintenance
likely represents the extension of everyday “talk” into a new forum, rather than a replacement of
more conventional ones. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2001)
examining Internet use reports that 90% of their participants who use messaging programs do so
to sustain connections with family and friends. Moreover, 45% of teens report using an IM
program each time they went on-line, with the percentage increasing to 89% for those who do so
everyday, indicating their use to be quite frequent. This increased acceptance and use for
maintaining ongoing involvements is a natural extension of the Internet as venue for conducting
relational business (cf. Utz, 2000) and warrants further examination.
The present study examines how IM is utilized as a relational maintenance tool for
conducting everyday interactions. It should be noted that investigations of on-line tools (such as
IM) provide unique research opportunities for relational scholars, not only because of their
increasing popularity and widespread availability, but also because they offer a prospect for
examining important relational processes as they occur in everyday life. As Parks and Floyd
(1996) state, “The ultimate social impact of cyberspace will not flow from its exotic capabilities,
but rather from the fact that people are putting it to ordinary, even mundane, social uses” (p.94).
Because routine everyday interactions embody relational maintenance (Duck, 1988), they
provide a rich context for examining questions about individual-, relational-, and contextual-
level characteristics. It is from this perspective that the present study approaches IM.
We begin our investigation by describing the nature of IM, and then examine why the use of
computer-mediated communication within the domain of relational maintenance has received
relatively little scholarly attention. Next, we propose a series of research questions and examine
them through a two-stage approach to data collection. In the first stage, participants reported on
Convention