Reality TV begets "promiscuous friending".

• Position: Mass Media

A relationship between reality television viewing and "promiscuous friending" on popular social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, has been found in a study of television viewing and communication patterns among young adults by University at Buffalo (N.Y.) researchers, who link this conduct to ordinary people modeling the behavior of reality TV celebrities. Such individuals are creating "mediated social selves" that the researchers describe as identities crafted for, presented on, and "known" through media.

According to the study, heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they have larger social networks, share more photos, and are more likely to engage in "friendships" with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending. The study indicates an erosion of the distinction between the everyday world and the celebrity world, in which common people claim intimacy with the completely mediated identities of such celebrities as Britney Spears or Brad Pitt.

These heavy RTV viewers also produce a significantly larger number of mediated selves and have a greater intimacy toward, and urge to interact with, the mediated social images of others. All of these, point out the researchers, are commonly considered celebrity behaviors. "We found robust, systematic, and statistically significant differences between viewers and nonviewers of RTV in terms of the behavior indices used here," explains Michael A. Stefanone, assistant professor in the Department of Communication, noting that other categories of television viewing, like news, fiction, and educational programming are not related to users' online behavior.

"Our research is founded on the premise that the confluence of the rising popularity of both RTV and Web 2.0 applications has resulted in a fundamental shift in people's roles as media content consumers and producers."

The study used social cognitive theory as the theoretical foundation for a survey of young adults, hypothesizing that they would find the positive relationship between RTV consumption and behaviors believed to reflect the systemic processing of messages and behavior modeled within the RTV genre. "Promiscuous frienders may be reproducing the fame-seeking behavior that is modeled by reality TV characters," Stefanone declares, adding that these behaviors are believed to reflect the...