ABSTRACT
The Internet provides a magnificent engine for information seeking for just about everything, from replacement parts and obscure facts to interpersonal information. That the Internet provides modes for initiating and managing relationships is a fact (see Duck, 2008). More and more new applications come into being for the primary purpose of gathering and sharing personal information among friends and acquaintances, to discover and appraise possible social partners, and to maintain relationships. As a result of these new applications, people are able to gather not just more, but different, kinds of information about others than the Internet, or other conversational means, formerly allowed. Not long ago, the interpersonal information people exchanged online was verbal (typed), and under the relatively complete control of the sender: What you said about yourself, explicitly or implicitly, was reflected in your e-mail, your discussion-board postings, or your chat room comments. The early World Wide Web added more modalities—photos and linking—and although control remained with the page author, the effects of additional visual information produced complex effects on impressions and relations. As the Internet has developed, more information about people becomes available through involuntary sources—database archives of past behavioral traces and third-party comments—which further complicate issues of control and the impact of information. The manner in which people use these archives and socially shared commenting systems can be understood conceptually by mapping their actions and online resources to a model of Internet information-seeking strategies. This chapter examines recent models, findings, and promising new research directions related to the way people seek and share interpersonal information via the Internet. It will attempt to illuminate that social information seeking phenomena (seeking personal, interpersonal, and descriptive information about other people) via the Internet sometimes results in counterintuitive effects on basic impressions and evaluations of others. These ironic effects of more information, particularly the influence of photos, raise challenges for traditional models of computer-mediated communication (CMC), and add interesting new boundaries to the hyperpersonal model of communication in online settings. This chapter further examines a recent model of online information seeking that expands the traditional typology of information-seeking strategies and encompasses new applications like search engines, databases, and social network sites. Finally, it examines new concepts and new directions in research premised on the notion that the Internet now often presents multiple information sources— information by target people and information left by others about target people—and how these developments, too, may affect social information seeking and social information processing on the Internet.
