From Facebook Toward the Metaverse – How the Future Educators Build Interpersonal Relationships Using Social Media

At the threshold of emerging parallel immersive environments and metaverse worlds, the use of social media to build interpersonal relationships is a common phenomenon. This study aimed to diagnose, describe, and compare the use of social media to build and sustain interpersonal contacts and to refer to the level of interpersonal competences among students of pedagogical courses in two selected universities in Poland and Portugal. The studies were quantitative and employed the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire by D. Buhrmester, W. Furman, M.T. Wittenberg and H.T. Reis, as well as the author’s own questionnaire. The analyses show that social media play a major role in building interpersonal relationships for Polish and Portuguese students in areas such as establishing new contacts, maintaining offline relationships, mutual learning and self-presentation. Non-face-to-face relations may interfere with establishing contact face to face. The analyses also show that the level of interpersonal competences among the respondents in terms of the skills and readiness to provide emotional support to others is differentiated by the way and scope of social media usage in the area under consideration. It can be assumed that in the group of respondents, the more they are willing and able to provide emotional support to others, the more effective and balanced way they use social media in building interpersonal relationships.