Over the past few days, I’ve been discussing the problems of multiple contexts in social software. While I am primarily covering this problem in the context of Facebook, this is a problem that affects all social software. I’m actually feeling this problem most acutely with Twitter these days.
When we use social software, we adopt a persona. Broadly speaking, that persona is mediated by the audience and publicness of the space. For example, this blog is hyper-public (Googlable) and the audience is mostly research- and tech-folk. As a result, I write on topic and try to stay away from stuff that is going to embarrass me too much down the road. A simple equation, but I think it works.
At some level, we all engage in this audience/publicness calculation when we craft our persona in social software. Blogs charted this territory; the central tenet of “successful blogging” is knowing one’s audience. But blogs are usually hyper-public, meaning the nuance of publicness is lost. Let’s consider private Twittering as an alternative.
When one elects privacy measures in Twitter, they limit their publicness. That is, they exercise control over who sees the persona they are creating, a persona that is a function of audience. As private Twitterers construct these trusted places – they understand their audience/publicness calculation – the persona becomes more personal, the content more engaging. Remarked to me via a private Twitter message, “it feels like we have insight into ppls thoughts thru-out the day.”
The best social software should make you feel like you’re amongst friends, encouraging you to create a more true persona. The best social software lets you be you – whatever that you happens to be at the moment. Facebook 2005 hit that sweet spot, and Twitter affords the more geeky of us that place today. Perhaps this is why every time I log into Facebook all I see are Twitter status messages; vibrancy lies in the more personal network.
As contexts collide, however, the audience/publicness calculation has to be reworked. I don’t dare look at the hundreds of Twitter follower requests waiting for me (most spam – I’m not that internet famous yet), because I know allowing more people in to my circle would force me to refactor myself in Twitter. And I don’t want to do that yet, not while the experience is still so great. Ultimately, though, I’ll have to, and that will be the death of Twitter for me. The publicness will force depersonalization, and my Twitter will become like my blog.
Is this process unavoidable? I’m not sure. But the expectation of hyper-publicness ultimately written into social software needs to be rethought. As we force users to constantly renegotaite the audience/publicness calculation, I think we lose more than we gain. Rather than ultimately forcing publicness, we need to think of ways for users to create private spaces for sharing. This is why so many people love and care about LiveJournal to this day – it allowed the creation of private spaces.
Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It’s time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
I agree 100%, Fred. It’s also important that the people to whom we allow selective access not be able to see which group we have put them in. If I allow you to see what I post to group X, I don’t want you to know that X == “acquaintances”, not “intimate friends” because you might feel bad about that. This is a super private categorization that we all engage in.
Your idea reminds me of this pattern.
– ge