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"You can't block people offline": examining how facebook's affordances shape the disclosure process

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Guided by the underlying question of how--if at all--the self-disclosure process varies online, the present study explores the self-disclosure practices of 26 American graduate students on Facebook through in-depth interviews. Building on work by Derlega and Grzelak [12] on self- disclosure goals and focusing on the affordances of the site, findings reveal both commonalities with and extensions to existing communication research on self-disclosure, as users saw both benefits and drawbacks to the high visibility and persistence of content shared through the site. Furthermore, users employed a wide spectrum of strategies to help them achieve their disclosure goals while decreasing perceived risks associated with making disclosures in a public forum. Importantly, these strategies generally sought to recreate the offline boundaries blurred or removed by the technical structure of the site and allow users to engage in a more strategic disclosure process with their network.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
    February 2014
    1600 pages
    ISBN:9781450325400
    DOI:10.1145/2531602
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    Published: 15 February 2014

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    1. context collapse
    2. facebook
    3. impression management
    4. privacy
    5. self-disclosure
    6. social network sites

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    • (2024)Theorizing Self Visibility on Social Media: A Visibility Objects LensACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/366033731:3(1-28)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
    • (2024)The Subtleties of Self-Presentation: A study of sensitive disclosure among sexual minority adolescentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374088:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
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