Easily connected but difficult to become intimate? Intercultural friendships on social media among Taiwanese ESL students in the US

摘要

ESL students in an exchange program are likely to be active users of social networking technologies while abroad. Social media allows them to connect with friends from different cultures, while also offering a cultural cocoon for these ESL students to remain connected with their old cliques without interacting with locales from the host countries. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and textual analysis with 18 Taiwanese ESL students in the United States, this study asked informants to retrospectively recount their use of social media with respect to English learning and intercultural relationships during their sojourning experiences. Friendships between Taiwanese and people from other cultures may face linguistic and cultural barriers, and while the use of social media embedded within various multimedia communicative tools (e.g. static or animated stickers, selfies or hyperlinks) can help overcome the tensions and challenges involved in the initial stage of communication, these multimedia communicative tools were phatic and supplementary to textual information. Intercultural/interracial friendships can only be better maintained and sustained with the sojourner’s mastering of textism in vernacular English, and interlocutors can experience greater social bonding as more textual information is created. Unless tailor-made for a specific interlocutor, graphic postings shared on social media are mostly merely complementary to textual information. Additionally, social media nurtures intercultural friendships between ESL students from different East Asian countries (e.g. Taiwanese and South Koreans in the US) more effectively than friendships between Taiwanese ESL students and North-Americans.