For my final project I am working with J.Mastin to identify perceptions of privacy among teen and college age SNS users. Because of our familiarity with and the use of Facebook, we have chosen this as our primary site of study.
What is online identity?
Online identity is the combination of the persona a user creates and maintains in the online environment and the actions and interactions that support, enhance, or contradict that persona.
Use Scenario One: "Finding Friends"
Like many sites, Facebook uses the term Friend to describe any and all contacts a user has approved. This term is highly subjective and ambiguous in the immense and open online environment. Profiles are searchable by name, email, "networks," or affiliations like school or work. The system may also suggest potential Friends based on these elements or if you share Friends with other users.
User A joins Facebook and sets up a profile. Now User A would like to find friends. One option is the Search for People Function:
Once User A has identified a possible friend they initiate contact by choosing to add User B as a friend. The system sends out an email to User B asking that the Friendship be confirmed:
Once the Friendship has been confirmed Users A and B will be able to view each other's profiles, receive Status update information, and communicate via chat, Wall Posts, or the Facebook private messaging system.Use Scenario Two: "Identifying depth of relationships"
The use of the ambiguous term Friend for all connected users creates some confusion around the depth of given relationships between users. Knowing the depth of connections between users can help one assess each other's real online identities...the people you most closely associate with and the ways in which you associate (use of language, tone, consistency of association) can indicate real interests, personality traits, and be important in protecting one's privacy. It can also, more simply, help identify people one may want to befriend, based on the type of relationships they support with other individual users.
One indicator of the depth of the relationship between users is the use of the public comment options. Users can comment on their Friends' Status or Activities. The following shot identifies a comment thread around a user's relationship status (mine...). If one looks at the language, frequency and consistency of posts by individuals to my Status and Activity information one can make some educated guesses regarding the depth and types of relationships between myself and these other users.
Assessing the relationships Friends have with each other and with others gives a user some feedback regarding relationships and what type of information one may want to publish in this semi-private forum. Unless the privacy settings are set for Friends only, information is viewable by people a user may not have any knowledge of. This is a huge privacy issue and there is plenty of information that a user may not wish to post so as to protect his or her online identity and privacy.
Analysis and Reading Connections:
It is useful and important to know who one's fellow users are associating with in an SNS like Facebook, and to know the nature of those interactions. Security settings can support privacy by limiting access to only approved Friends...however if a user has a desire to network, than they must allow more open access. In this instance, knowing ones Friends (and those who want to be one's Friends), and something about the relationships they support with other users can be critical in protecting one's online persona and privacy. As usual, I found some of our readings far more applicable but most were quite interesting.
In "The Social Affordance of the Internet for Networked Individualism" the authors are concerned with societal change "away from groups and towards networked individualism." (Wellman 2003, 3) Attention is a commodity as people trend towards moving through multiple communities that they choose to participate in, a concept also discussed in the Huberman article. In Use Scenario Two, the more attention a user receives from other users may be an indicator of the depth of the relationship between users. Take it a little farther with the discussion of the Huberman article and the reciprocal nature of relationships is also an assessable indicator of the depth of relationships. Judith Donath's article talks about how Friend lists can provide social context, though the ambiguous nature of the term Friend may make this complicated to assess.
In terms of our final project it may be interesting to know how teen and college age SNS users assess their friends and their relationships with other users and whether or not they consider these relationships when they consider online privacy.
