An Exploratory Study of Indian University Students' Use of Social Networking Web Sites: Implications for the Workplace
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1080569908330379
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  peer-reviewed

Agarwal, Shaijila and Monika Mital
Business Communication Quarterly
2009

Abstract:

Increasingly, individuals across the world seek relations of cooperation and collaboration rather than that of command and control. This need has influenced the rate at which individuals have allowed the Internet to intricately weave itself into their everyday lives in just over a decade. For many people, human interaction has truly adopted a virtual dimension. Online communities now link to one another and form a complicated technical web of interactions. Social networking Web sites (SNWs) are online tools that have transformed the virtual encounters of the past that were technical and impersonal to today's virtual socialization that is truly nontechnical, social, and interpersonal. The purpose of this article is to report the findings of a study we conducted among university students. We developed a survey to identify the reasons for which individuals use SNWs. We believe that these findings contribute to understanding future workplace expectations and arrangements.