To Love, Honor, and Inform from This Site Forward: A Model of Dyadic Information Behavior in Online-Initiated Relationships

How people engaged in a close, dyadic long-term relationship (LTR) share information behavior can be considered a hallmark non-romantic measure of online relationship creation success. Dyadic LTR information behavior, however, has not been addressed from an information science perspective. Drawing upon findings from studies in social psychology and economics, and other frameworks (transactive memory, lay information mediaries, everyday life information seeking, and principle of least effort), this paper presents a model of couple's dyadic information behavior that comprises six elements: context, seeking, storing, managing, sharing, and barriers as they occur over five stages (individuals meet online, learn each other's information behavior, merge information taxonomies, establish transactive memory, and eventually the couple dissolves-meaning shared information is lost). The model is additionally relevant to dyadic LTRs involving business, artistic, and other collaborations. Implications are discussed for a forthcoming empirical investigation, as well as the design of services, applications and policy.