Summary of all articles of New Media Challenges (S_NMC) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Communicationscience year 3. This summary contains all of the articles that need to be read for this course in year .
NOTE: One of the articles is in Dutch, since this article was also covered in the 2nd...
Samenvatting artikelen - New Media Challenges
Walther (2011) - Introduction to Privacy Online
• The more users disclose of themselves, the more they may enjoy the benefits the systems have to
offer, but also, the more they disclose, the more they risk what they themselves consider breaches
of their privacy
• Three complicating factors that have and continue to confront users of online systems include:
1. A misplaced presumption that online behavior is private
2. That the nature of the internet at a mechanical level is quite incommensurate with privacy
3. That one’s expectation of privacy does not constitute privileged communication by
definition
• It may be due to the analogous offline activities which online communication resembles or
replaces, that many internet users post information online which they don’t anticipate will be
seen by others than the specific group they imagined when posting
• It may be difficult for internet users (at least those whoa re not digital natives) to recognize that
online exchanges are neither fleeting nor confined, which leads to many disappointments and
surprises (people post statements of illegal, insulting, or foolish behavior on their social network
profiles)
The internet is a store-and-forward technology —> in order for the internet to work as it does, it
must be able to capture, retain, and transmit the information which users enter into it
• Many internet users fail to realize that something once put online more or less tays online, and
may be retrieved by others and replicated, despite the subsequent inclination or efforts of the
original poster to protect or remove it
• “Ignorance and a false sense of security (that) play an important tolre in users’ approach to the
privacy of their online postings”
• If anyone in the internet-using public can see one’s messages, the messages are in the public
domain
• “Privacy issues offline, to which a set of well-established cultural, social, and legal norms may
be applied, the burden of online privacy protection is primarily shouldered by an individual’s
own conscious effort”
• Privacy-threatening aspects of social network sites are:
1. Persistence
2. Searchability
3. Exact copy ability
4. Invisible audiences
• For contemporary users of social media, their level of privacy protection is relative to the number
of friends, their criteria for accepting friends, and the amount and quality of personal data
provided online
• These risks can be mitigated by limitations in friending behaviors, privacy settings, and
disclosures
, 2
Bazarova & Choi (2014) - Self-disclosure in social media: Extending the functional approach
to disclosure motivations and characteristics on social network sites
SNSs —> Social Network Sites
Public disclosures vs. traditional understandings of self-disclosure
• Self disclosure —> the act of revealing personal information to others
- It is an intentional act typically communicated through verbal behaviors describing the
person, their experiences, and feelings
- Self-disclosure decisions are guided by a complex dialectics of openness and closeness,
and the tension of public and private persona management
- Self-disclosure fulfills fundamental needs for social connectedness and belonging and is
intrinsically rewarding, but it also carries inherent risks of vulnerability and
information loss because a discloser gives up some degree of privacy and personal control
by sharing information with others
—> Disclosure decisions and strategies reflect a balance of conflicting needs, aimed at maximizing
strategic rewards and minimizing personal risks
• Dyadic boundary —> a strategy for optimizing the disclosure rewards/risks ratio, in which a
discloser shares personal information with a trusted recipient
- This selective disclosure minimizes a discloser’s vulnerability and personal information
risks, while still satisfying the desired goals and motivations
- People are most comfortable sharing intimate disclosures with either a complete stranger
or a trusted companion within a dyadic boundary
- The least disclosure occurs between:
1. Acquaintances who don’t know each other well, but anticipate future interaction
2. In the presence of uninvolved and uninterested third parties or observers due to increased
vulnerability and information control losses
• Although self-disclosures on SNSs can be shared dyadically or selectively with a certain group of
recipients (private messaging, chat, friend lists on Facebook), many of them are publicly shared
with a whole network of ‘friends’ or followers, composed of large and diverse audiences
• SNS users also share intimate information (sexual preference, relational updates, depressive
symptoms, etc.) next to peripheral information (restaurant likes, etc.), which is incongruent to
the principle of incremental and gradual disclosure that suggest that people start by sharing
peripheral information and move to more intimate disclosures as they gain trust in their partner
Functional approach to self-disclosure
• Broadcasting self-disclosure —> sharing personal information in a public situation (in a
classroom or an interview)
- It involves a public recital of innocuous and uninvolving facts and presents and edited or
packaged version of the self
, 3
• Functional theory of self-disclosure —> disclosure goals or subjective reasons for self-disclosing
activate disclosure decision-making process and shape its content
- If we wish to understand and predict individuals’ self-disclosing behavior, we must identify
(and measure) the major sources of value that self-disclosure has for individuals —> these
sources of value reflect social rewards hoped to attain through self-disclosure, and they fall
into five basic categories:
1. Social validation —> seeks to validate one’s self-concept and self-value by increasing
social approval, social acceptance, and general liking
2. Self-expression —> helps relieve distress through venting out negative emotions and
disclosing problems
3. Relational development —> seeks to increase relational intimacy and closeness with
another person
4. Identify clarification —> conveys information about one’s identity and defines one’s
position for self and others
5. Social control — is used to strategically share information about self in an effort to
control social outcomes and resources such as information or social benefits
Disclosure decision model —> incorporated the role of goals in predicting disclosure
characteristics, such as disclosure intimacy or duration
- Personality characteristics and situational cues are activators of disclosure goals, since
personality traits predispose pursuit of certain disclosure rewards, and situational cues
increase accessibility and salience of a disclosure reward
- Situational cue —> a romantic setting makes a relational development goal more
accessible than an office setting
• Representations of interaction partners —> serve as situational cues that activate different
relational goals, and these goals can be either conscious or operate outside of awareness to
influence perception and behavior
- Even without a partner’s physical presence, a reminder of a specific relational partner or
simply thinking about them is sufficient to trigger a goal unique to a particular relationship
or an interpersonal context
- The study of Rosenfeld and Kendrick (1984) supports the role of partner representations
in conditioning disclosure goals. The variations on setting intimacy had little effect on
self-reported disclosure goals, partner familiarity was associated with different sets of
disclosure goals. —> thus, as with other interpersonal goals, partner representations
(especially those of familiar vs unfamiliar targets) can trigger different disclosure goals and
motivations
Functional model of self-disclosure on SNSs
Media affordances and audiences on SNSs
• Social media affordances —> reflect users’ perceptions of media utility in supporting social
practices
• They define four affordances consistently present in social media, including SNSs:
- Data permanence
- Communal visibility of social information and communication
- Message edibility
- Associations between individuals, as well as between a message and its creator
, 4
• Facebook communication forms vary in the degree of communal visibility —> whereas status
updates and wall posts are by default visible to everyone who has access to the system, private
messages and chats are exchanged in closed (often one-to-one) interactions
• Invisible audiences —> (example) when a profile owner’s friend comments on a status update
initially restricted to his/her Facebook network, it becomes accessible to members of their
networks, thus increasing content exposure and redistribution
• Context collapse of audiences —> people from different social circles and life periods are
collapsed into one network
• SNS forms differ in the degree of interaction directness —> Facebook status updates are not
directed at anyone in particular, but private messages and wall posts are directed at a single
receiver
- Non-directed messages are author-centric compared to directed messages
Effects of visibility and directness on audience representations and disclosure goals
• Imagined audiences —> a mental picture of whom people are communicating with, which is
based on cues people derive from social media environments
- Both directness and visibility affect audience construction on SNSs
• Visibility is another factor in activating disclosure goals
Hypotheses
• H1 —> people pursue different disclosure goals in Facebook status updates, wall posts, and
private messages
• H2 —> disclosures directed at a familiar other, as via Facebook wall posts and private
messaging, are associated with relational development goals more than disclosures directed at
general others, as via Facebook status updates
• H3a —> people pursue greater social validation goals in non directed status updates compared to
directed wall posts and private messages
• H3b —> social validation goals are more salient in public wall posts compared to private
messages
• H4 —> SNS users can adapt to different affordances by choosing to reveal less intimate and
private information via public status updates and wall posts than via private messaging on
Facebook
• H5 —> disclosure goals are expected to affect disclosure intimacy
• H6 —> less intimate disclosures are associated with social validation goals compared to other
self-disclosure goals, especially the more personally involving relational development goals
• H7 —> disclosure goals are predicted to mediate between Facebook communication forms and
disclosure intimacy
Method
• Undergraduate students from a university in the US, whom had a Facebook profile were recruited
to participate
• Combination of content analysis and survey
• The questions about intimacy included three items from a 7-point scale —> non intimate-
intimate, impersonal-personal, public-private
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