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.
It is ironic that although people want to network online on SNSs like Facebook, they lock down their profiles so as to prevent anonymous users from viewing them, including people they may know but who are not on their friends list. On Facebook, I noticed that this one girl had no profile picture, and she must have disabled the option of allowing people to view her friends list because I was not able to see it. I also noticed that beneath her name, Facebook wrote that we have two friends in common, and I was able to see who they were.
ReplyDeleteBy locking down profiles so as to ensure users' privacy, it would be frustrating for one to have to comb through profiles in the search results to try to find his or her loved one or friend whom he or she has not spoken to in years, given just a name and no other information like a friends list and a profile picture.
Lastly, I agree with you that the commenting system on Facebook gives one an insight into the relationships between a person and his or her friends; in my opinion, even just writing "Hi!" on someone's Wall a couple of times a week shows that that person cares, and to some people (including lurkers like me), this message could mean a whole lot.
I agree that the term "friend" is a little too ambiguous. I have a facebook account and many "friends", with less than 10 of those being actual close friends. Most are acquaintances and high school classmates. My identity is fluid because of the different groups of friends that know me in different ways. I'm even in a couple of different groups within facebook! Unlike the Ploderer reading that talks about people that use social networks to support "passion-centric activities," I just use facebook to maintain weak ties with no particular activity focus. I also find myself stymied by comments I see on a friends' profile. I feel like I didn't get the memo or it reminds me of being a third wheel. You know your friends have other friends, you just didn't used to be able to see all their interaction and private jokes that don't include you.
ReplyDeleteHi Linnea,
ReplyDeleteThough I'm a month late, I'd like to congratulate you on your status in Use Scenario two!
My mind is on romantic relationships right now, and I'm curious to learn more about college aged students and dating. I don't know if this relates to your project, but let's say there is a guy pursuing girl. He friends her, she accepts. He starts to post on her wall and comment on her status updates. Depending on his theories of how to get a girl to like him, he may start to post to his own friends' walls (only coolest and best looking ones, of course) to solicit posts on his wall to make him seem sociable. The guy and girl end up dating, and going out for a year. Their circles of friends have meshed. But one day, they have a bad breakup. What do they do when everyone's so connected through Facebook? The guy and girl could agree to unfriend (defriend?) each other or change to limited profile. If not, then they will see each others' lives as they start to date new people. Ouch. Or they will need to up privacy settings in general.
Thank you! I have heard of bad break-up scenarios on Facebook...in fact, one of my sister's best friends was devastated when one day she signed on and her boyfriend had changed his relationship status to single. He didn't say anything to her in person.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's sort of ironic how Facebook has opened a whole way of communicating and how we sometimes use these communication tools to get attention on purpose. For example, a Facebook user can put on their relationship status online. A Facebook user can also write on their friends' walls for a more public "conversation" or use the messaging system to keep a conversation less public.
ReplyDeleteWell, my husband and I are friends with my son on Facebook. His status has changed from "in a relationship" to "single". Sneaky parents get to see his life on Facebook. For awhile, the girl was posting love notes on his wall. Here's where that attention commodity has a role, in person and online. I suppose it works online as well as off. However, unless you're breaking up with someone in a middle of a screaming match at the prom, your relationship issues remain one-on-one.
I've noticed that there are more "dramas" that unfold online that squirm their way in real life. In other words, students have breached trust online and have had to face consequences in person.
Some friends of mine who have been in a relationship quite a long time (3+ years) once changed their relationship status to "It's Complicated" as a joke and apparently within the next day or so both of them got many messages asking what had happened! It's strange how much stock a lot of people in my generation put in facebook.
ReplyDeleteI think the amount you want to declare changes as you get older, too. When I first joined Facebook I joined a whole bunch of groups and said a lot of personal things on my profile - but that was because I *had* blocked my profile from non-friends, and the only people I had friended were my real friends. As I added more people, and after I joined LIS, suddenly professors and other people who I had professional relationships with were adding me, and I felt like I had to cut back on what I was displaying quite a bit. Perhaps part of it is because I'm shy, but I also figured that everyone really didn't want or need to see all my photos and notes.
In terms of what BJ said even though my profile is locked down I think it's easy to find me: I do let my profile picture be searchable and my networks as well, and I think most of the time that information. Even though I have a common first & last name in the Midwest, my picture and networks give enough information for someone to see if it's me or not. You might ask why I don't just make my limited profile public if I have filters anyway...the answer is that I just like to know who's looking at my profile, that's all!
(The big Japanese social networking site Mixi lets you see the last 5 people that have looked at your profile. I can imagine that would make everyone here go nuts.)
Also, good luck navigating the current privacy filters on facebook. I sent in a complaint recently because they've become far too complicated and "switches" in some places (ex: general privacy filters) override others (ex: a specific note's settings).
My husband (well I did for him because he’s not too into computers) recently signed up for Facebook. I went in to change his privacy setting because I remember when I joined that the default was anyone in the same network could see my profile. I was surprised to find that the default for my husband was “friends only” across the board (yes, manda, I’ve also noticed some settings switch, like for notes and photos, don't know why). But I'm sure others who've joined earlier still have public profiles and they may not know it.
ReplyDeleteBJ- I have my profile “locked down” because I’m not interested in networking, I just want to see the profiles of friends I already have offline. However, I have a unique name and I don’t think it’s difficult for someone who knows my name to find me. I’ve looked for friends a few times and many of them had tight privacy controls but they usually always had a message function. I would just send a message like, “BJ, is that you? Let's be friends!”
I limited my own definition of online identity to a single online community like facebook because an online identity could include footprints across multiple communities. If there are tools to retrieve the aggregate presence easily, I'm guessing that would provide provide a clearer picture for online identity. This is especially because various online communities target different types of content and an online presence on one site could provide only one angle on an identity. Then I noticed that facebook built all these tools to suck in content through features like rss feed linking so that personal blogs from other sites can be included a facebook page. Facebook is turning into this central repository of identity rich data. I hope it doesn't turn evil.
ReplyDeleteInteresting observation on the interaction with other users and the strength of the social connection. There was an article in a recent issue of the Economist that discussed the social circles within facebook. The article linked a physiological limitation to the number of people that humans interact with and found this same type of consistency in the number of "friends" that each each user interacts with on facebook.
It’s interesting that watching public comments is helpful to identify users in depth. I agree that the term Friend is very ambiguous to describe all the relationship in Facebook. Except for being a fan of a certain person, Facebook users click the Friend function to connect another user. I also chose Facebook for this assignment, but I never thought how to keep online identity and privacy. As a Facebook user, do you have any advice?
ReplyDeleteAdvice: regularly check your privacy settings, ensure information you post in the public forums is information you wouldn't regret having anyone see, use the more private interpersonal modes of communication (chat and messaging) for private conversations between yourself and other users. I use Facebook to keep in touch with many people on a relatively superficial level...it's a way to maintain contact. I use chat, messaging, personal email, phone calls and in person chats to fulfill the deeper needs of any given relationship.
ReplyDelete