Immigration to Facebook Virtual Community and the Impact on Prague Offline Relationships

These days old-fashioned ways of developing and maintaining relationships suffer from the fast-growing CMC communication. Following this does this evolution of computer-mediated communication have an influence on social relationships, friendships and user behavior? This thesis examines how strongly can social media influence people, their cultural identity and online/offline bonds. The thesis is mainly focused on Facebook social network, which currently brings together more than a billion people. My work is based on three hypotheses and my aim is to confirm or disprove whether people consciously dissemble and show better me than fact, whether our behaviour online has an affect on offline relationships in terms of weakening ties, and whether the Facebook relationships have weaker ties than traditional offline relationships. This thesis will be based on a survey of at least 400 people from Prague regarding their use of Facebook to form and maintain relationships. The questionnaire survey is based on the theories of CMC created by theorist Christian Fuchs in his publication Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age published in 2008