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The Importance Of Interpersonal Communication

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With so many social media platforms and messaging applications all vying for people’s attention, managing which media to use and what information to disclose becomes increasingly complex and multifaceted. Since social media choices are rarely constrained by considerations of access and costs, theories of interpersonal communication have shifted from questions of access to questions of choice, i.e. how and why are individuals making use of the different multi-media channels that are available to them, which echoes past research on media choice in traditional communication settings before the advent of social media (Perse & Dunn 1998).
To be sure, the main premise of this view is that people in the studied population are not bound to their social media choices by an external force. On the contrary, they are ostensibly free to choose between any possible combination of SNSs with any given person in their daily lives, without being subject to powerful external authorities that may mandate or prohibit the use of specific media. The other premise is that SNSs are embedded in a broader media environment of many available media technologies and traditional communicative channels, including face-to-face meetings, emails, letters and other conventional telecommunications. In this diverse media framework, each platform represents a set of affordances that can be inter-subjectively and recursively perceived by individual users (Hayes et al. 2016; Nagy & Neff 2015), as detailed in

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