One of my friends (a different one from last week) who read my last post was curious about how much we will tell others about ourselves online if we were known to them as opposed to being anonymous. For instance, you giving personal information on Facebook where persons who are familiar with you make up your audience. One can appreciate that cyberspace is not one generic space as it consist of many different types of spaces, so it shouldn’t be surprising that our levels of self-disclosure vary across different online spaces. So the question posed for this week is why and in what ways is self-disclosure on Facebook different from telling others about ourselves in less ‘nonymous’ online spaces?
We Still Spill The Beans On Facebook But We Are Sneakier About It
On Facebook we are more likely to be known by our ‘friends’ and therefore it isn’t surprising that we aren’t as open as in other online spaces were we are relatively anonymous. However, from personal experience we obviously do still give personal and private information about ourselves but recent research shows we are a tad bit more strategic with our disclosures.
Self-disclosure, The ‘Multiple Audience Problem’ And Facebook
Multiple-audience problems (Fleming, 1994) exist when we try to simultaneously communicate different and or conflicting opinions or aspects of our personalities to different audiences (e.g., peers, parents and nosey people like an up-tight cousin) that are present. These problems present themselves in several forms where we the communicators convey social information (, such as identity information and messages). For example (not from personal experience), I wanting to tell my friends from the club last night that I enjoyed myself but at the same time don’t want my parents or fellow church members (who are also Facebook friends) to know I went to the club..
Strategic Self-Disclosure on Facebook
Last year I conducted some research investigating this specific problem for Facebook users and my study’s results confirmed Fleming (1994) and Fleming, Darley, Hilton, and Kojetin (1990) findings from their studies on the multiple audience problem. Our studies outlined several ways in which individuals avoided and solved their problems with multiple audiences both online and offline. We discussed how people segregate their audiences, perform role-distancing behaviours and also send hidden and vague messages so to gain control of their personal information and resolve these problems with multiple audiences.
Audience Segragation
Audience segregation refers to the separation of one’s audiences so they would not be privy to inappropriate and unintended information. For example, on Facebook we limit who can see our status updates, certain photo albums and the sort. An example of this offline can be for instance adults who when talking about sex send children out of the room.
Role-Distancing Behaviour
Practically speaking, audience segregation is not always possible and sometimes individuals engage in what we call role-distancing behaviour instead. These distancing behaviours are usually used to signal to others that your actions are constrained and or to be cautiously interpreted, as you would not want others coming to conclusions about you based on that particular behaviour.
Sending Mixed And Vague Messages
Lastly, we sometimes send mixed and vague messages in the presence of multiple audiences where only the intended audience fully understands the message. For example, in Fleming et al.’s (1990, study 2) study, participants were instructed to write essays that would give their friends clues to the location of a map while not communicating the map’s location to strangers who also read these essays. By giving false information their friends knew not to be true participants were able to conceal underlying messages from the strangers and were successful in the task. Also, study results have shown that we use vague and generalised statements so not to contradict the impressions others formed about us previously. For example when we update our status updates to merely say, “I had an awesome time” rather than “the club was awesome last night, WUUUUUUU” (lol, something like that).
Final Thoughts
So in conclusion, on Facebook we do spill the beans but because of the different groups of persons who make up our audience we do so by asserting control through limiting access to our information, tactically managing that information and sending mixed and vague messages.
