Abstract
As the smartphone market grows rapidly, communication via smartphones is getting more popular and widespread in the world. Among others, use of mobile based Social Networking Services (SNS) has become a major communication method even with mobile phones. Especially, the Twitter, 140 character text-based SNS, well matches with the smartphone characteristics of instant Internet access with limited bandwidth, thus being the center of mobile based SNS usage especially by the young generation in East Asian metropolises such as Seoul and Tokyo. This paper explores the influence of smartphonebased Twitter usage by these young consumers through their smartphones on their social and interpersonal relations. It analyzes how the usage affects the relationships among college students by applying a cause-effect model with several latent factors, namely the usage of mobilebased Twitter, social network building, individual factors and social influence, which are composed of several observable variables. A structural equation model successfully visualized the correlations among the latent and observable variables. The result shows that the usage of smartphone-based Twitter in the young generation in Seoul and Tokyo has a limited influence on the social and interpersonal relationships in real life, and that persons having expertise have more social influence than celebrities having more Twitter followers.
