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1. Introduction
Miltenberger (2012) has defined characteristics of behavior as that it involves a person’s action (what people do or say). It has one or more dimensions that can be measured, that is where we can count the number of times a behavior occurs. Behaviors can be observed, described, and recorded by others or by the person engaging in the behavior. It has an impact on the environment, including the physical or the social environment. Behavior is lawful that its occurrence is systematically influenced by environmental events. It may be overt or covert, where overt is an action that can be observed and recorded by a person, whereas covert is a behavior that cannot be observed and recorded.
The characteristics of behaviors can be interrelated to the change of behavior in the near environment of online context in terms of communication. Beebe, Beebe, and Redmond (2005) have stated that interactions among friends and family members have been dramatically altered by the introduction of the personal computer and computer-mediated communication (CMC). “It is a typical scene in modern families these days that the father may be watching the news on the television, the mother is busy fiddling with her smart phone, the sons are fighting aliens on the game console and the daughter is playing with the applications on her tablet. Every eyeball is looking at some sort of screen” (Shout, 2012). It is stated by Devito (2005) regarding online context to human relationship that “perhaps even more obvious than culture or gender is the influence of technology on interpersonal relationships”; “not surprisingly, those who communicated (online) more frequently formed more relationships”.
Devito’s view is here a counterpart to a research conducted by Hsu, Wang, and Tai (2011). It is disclosed that Facebook (FB) is a mechanism for new friends, rather than close friends, to become more acquainted. They have also stated that people will behave differently according to who they are interacting with, what kind of relationships they have, and other scenarios. Another emphasis from their research is that their respondents tended to use the Internet to make contacts with distant social circle and to utilize face-to-face contacts with local social circles. This is demonstrating that the relationship influences users’ social behaviors.
Online communication may...