Newsweek has a special section on Facebook at 5 years, featuring a number of interesting articles and videos. Nicole Ellison and I are interviewed for the lead piece.
To date, no one has come up with a reliable algorithm for “coolness,” (which might explain why Facebook fought the buzz behind Twitter by, um, copying it). But for academics like Stutzman and others increasingly turning their attention to social networks, there’s a name for what happens when everyone joins the same site at the same time, perhaps rendering it uncool: “context collapse.” That’s the term used to describe a series of awkward events like when your boss or parents friend you, or someone posts a picture of you that you don’t want your colleagues seeing, or when an elementary school bully from your past starts commenting on your status updates. As these activities cascade, social media research has shown that people begin to shy away from their online persona and begin aggressively limiting the information that appears about themselves. Not surprisingly, users begin to stress out about their tangled social scenes and abandon the network all together. “What needs to happen—and what’s going to happen—is that there needs to be more granular privacy settings,” says Nicole Ellison, who researches and teaches on social media at Michigan State University. “So I can share a status update, but one I only want to go to my high school friends.”
As a side note, this has to be one of the fastest primary-research-to-Newsweek jumps ever. We were interviewing dual-boundary maintainers in the morning, talking to Newsweek in the evening, and it was on the web the next day. As a side note, we’re very close to wrapping up our dual-boundary research, and it has been fascinating. Looking forward to presenting our conference paper at AOIR.
Hi Fred!
Where does the term ‘context collapse’ originate? Is it Michael Wesch? (See: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=183) I can’t find any published citations for it; do you have a paper in press or anything I can use?
Hope you & the family are well! Hopefully I’ll run into you at a conf/event sooner rather than later.
Alice,
I am not if danah used the exact term “context collapse”, but it was her talk about Stokely Carmichael, citing Joshua Myerowitz’s book “No Sense of Place” where I first encountered the concept. Some HCI work, including stuff from Dourish/Anderson, also approaches the topic.