ABSTRACT
With 1.23 billion active users every month, the social networking site (SNS) Facebook celebrated its tenth anniversary in February, 2014. Its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated enthusiastically: “we’re looking forward to our next decade and to helping connect the rest of the world” (Facebook Inc., 2014). One step toward this goal was obviously the $19 billion take-over of WhatsApp, a growing mobile-messaging startup. The sheer amount of money involved in this deal seems to indicate that connecting people via new technology is or at least is seen as a most protable business. Given the number of people using Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities today, the dominant motive for social media use seems to be a strong drive to be socially connected with each other, a motivation that is reected in psychological concepts such as the need for aliation (Hill, 1987), the need for self-relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000), or the need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).
