A study on Impact of Individualism and Collectivism on Individualism in Virtual Social Networks (Case study: Tarbiat Modares University)

In Iran, a lot of investigation about individualism and collectivism has been done. Each of these investigations reveals the degree of individualism or collectivism of the society under study on a spectrum. But the contribution of all these studies is to examine of individualism or collectivism of Iranians in real groups and networks, while the connection between this type of individualism and collectivism with collectivism and individualism in the virtual networks is ignored. Therefore, the question of this article is whether individualism and collectivism in the real world relate to individualism and collectivism within the virtual networks. The survey method was used for answering this question. The results of this research show that there is a direct relationship between individualism and networked individualism and there is an inverse relationship between collectivism and networked individualism. Therefore, those who are individualists in the real world have a high network individuality within virtual networks. And those who are collectivist in the real world have a low networked individualism in virtual networks. In other words, it seems that the individualism or collectivism of people in the real world affects their individual or collective actions in the online world.