Large numbers of college students have become avid Facebook users in a short period of time. In this paper, we explore whether these students are using Facebook to find new people in their offline communities or to learn more about people they initially meet offline. Our data suggest that users are largely employing Facebook to learn more about people they meet offline, and are less likely to use the site to initiate new connections.

Changes in the information society, especially the rise of blogs, have refocused attention on
questions of media modality, source identification, and motivation in online environments.
We manipulate the structure of a blogger’s critique on a news story (global vs. interspersed)
and the partisan target of the blogger (Democrats vs. Republicans) in an experiment
embedded in an online survey. Our results support our expectations: The more difficult
story format decreases the ability of less motivated readers to correctly identify the source
of their information, without affecting the motivated. These effects of structure on source
identification are democratically consequential when people rely on blogs for facts about
public affairs without the proper cautionary caveats regarding the credibility of the source.

The article analyzes how community members who were evacuated from their homes use various media, and especially the internet, to keep in touch, receive and disseminate information and express their opinions. Of particular interest are the differences between members of various groups, who differ in their decision whether to relocate in Israel with the rest of the original community or not, in media usage patterns and sense of community. The findings demonstrate that evacuees use diversity and multiplicity of media, where various media are used for different purposes according to need. Small media, with a rather limited and local reach (such as pamphlets, SMS, niche websites and small-scale meetings) are predominantly used for most of the needs, overshadowing mass media usage. Correlations were found amongst various media usages, and between the usage of various media and users’ sense of community. The study demonstrates how contemporary media users use a variety of media depending on their circumstances and needs, and how media usage assists in establishing and maintaining a sense of community after the forced transition from the communities of origin.