David Houghton

Privacy, Social Network Sites, and Social Relations

With the growth of the Internet comes a growth in a ubiquitous networked society. Common Web 2.0 applications include a rapidly growing trend for social network sites. Social network sites typically converged different relationship types into one group of “friends.” However, with such vast interconnectivity, convergence of relationships, and information sharing by individual users comes an increased risk of privacy violations. We asked a small sample of participants to discuss what friendship and privacy meant to them and to give examples of a privacy violation they had experienced. A thematic analysis was conducted on the interviews to determine the issues discussed by the participants. Many participants experienced privacy issues using the social network site Facebook. The results are presented here and discussed in relation to online privacy concerns, notably social network site privacy concerns and managing such information.

Digital Crowding: Privacy, Self-Disclosure, and Technology

In this chapter, we introduce and develop the concept of “digital crowding.” Traditionally, crowding has been conceptualized as excessive social contact or insufficient personal space (Altman 1975). Under these circumstances, not only do people show signs of stress, but they also engage in a number of techniques to escape excessive social contact (Baum and Valins 1977). For instance, studies of students in shared, crowded spaces find that they spend more time in their bedrooms than in social spaces, are more likely to seek friendships outside of the crowded area, and even sit further away from strangers in waiting rooms (Baum and Valins 1977). We argue that while much of the discussion of privacy and technology has focused on information flow and leakage, it has ignored the interactive, interpersonal impact of new technology. In this chapter, we begin by examining the key issues raised by technology for privacy. We then discuss earlier, non-technology focused theories that cover interpersonal aspects of privacy. Finally, we examine some ways in which technology might impact on interpersonal privacy, with a specific focus on social network sites.

Privacy as a fuzzy concept: A new conceptualization of privacy for practitioners

In recent years, technological innovation has re‐ignited an interest in privacy as designers, policy makers, and users each strive to reconcile the advantages of technology with the new demands they pose for privacy. Driven by a classic approach to defining concepts, scholars have not been able to agree on a unified definition of privacy. This poses a barrier to those who seek to implement privacy through their decisions. A critical component of their work involves anticipating and responding to potential privacy risks. In choosing one definition over another, practitioners might be missing nuanced contextual overlaps that bear on privacy and thus bias their subsequent decisions. For these practical endeavors, it is important to adopt an inclusive and rich definition. Such a definition should also be responsive to how those affected by decisions that might compromise privacy, namely citizens and technology users, conceive of privacy. The present paper applies a prototype perspective on privacy that acknowledges the fuzziness of concepts and goes on to develop such a definition in a series of empirical studies. The relevance of the privacy prototype is then explored as it applies to privacy theorists, practitioners, and methodologists, suggesting new avenues for future research.

Understanding the Psychological Process of Avoidance-Based Self-Regulation on Facebook

In relation to social network sites, prior research has evidenced behaviors (e.g., censoring) enacted by individuals used to avoid projecting an undesired image to their online audiences. However, no work directly examines the psychological process underpinning such behavior. Drawing upon the theory of self-focused attention and related literature, a model is proposed to fill this research gap. Two studies examine the process whereby public self-awareness (stimulated by engaging with Facebook) leads to a self-comparison with audience expectations and, if discrepant, an increase in social anxiety, which results in the intention to perform avoidance-based self-regulation. By finding support for this process, this research contributes an extended understanding of the psychological factors leading to avoidance-based regulation when online selves are subject to surveillance.

“What if my mum sees it?”: Examination of visible brand interaction in the presence of a wider network

Purpose It is known that to encourage people to interact (e.g. sharing) with brands through social media, businesses create content in line with the expectations of their target audience. On these sites, however, such interaction by consumers is visible, contributing to their self-presentation, which can be seen by their wider network; some of whom will find it appropriate, others may not. Currently, little is known about the effects of consumers’ own diverse set of audiences on behavioral intention toward brand interaction and emotional effect. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Survey methodology (n=386) was adopted to examine intention to interact with real brand posts. Findings Results show that the brand interaction is associated with social anxiety when it is felt that visible evidence of such actions is discrepant from the audience expectations. This, then, constrains the behavioral intention to interact with brands online. Practical implications For businesses to maximize brand interactions and minimize social anxiety, they must be mindful of not just the expectations of their target but also consider their target’s own network. For site designers, this research urges for greater refining of privacy tools and suggests the addition of a “Secret Like” option. Originality/value Encouraging visible brand interaction through social media is paramount for businesses. Managers focus only on their target audience when designing content but neglect to consider the self-presentational implications of interacting with branded content to wider networks. This paper shows that this must be considered to increase success and maintain ethical practice. This is of value for multiple-stakeholders, managers, users, site designers and academics.

What makes a good metaphor? A cross-cultural study of computer-generated metaphor appreciation

ABSTRACT Computers are now able to automatically generate metaphors, but some automatically generated metaphors are more well received than others. In this article, we showed participants a series of “A is B” type metaphors that were either generated by humans or taken from the Twitter account “MetaphorIsMyBusiness” (@MetaphorMagnet), which is linked to a fully automated metaphor generator. We used these metaphors to assess linguistic factors that drive metaphor appreciation and understanding, including the role of novelty, word frequency, concreteness, and emotional valence of the topic and vehicle terms. We additionally assessed how these metaphors were understood in three languages, including English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese, and whether participants thought they had been generated by a human or a computer. We found that meaningfulness, appreciation, speed in finding meaning, and humanness ratings were reliably correlated with each other in all three languages, which we interpret to indicate a more general property of “metaphor quality.” We furthermore found that in all three languages, conventional metaphors and those that contained an “optimal” (intermediate) degree of novelty were more likely to be perceived to be of higher quality than those that were extremely creative. Further analysis of the English data alone revealed that those metaphors that contained negatively valenced vehicle words and infrequent vehicle terms (in comparison with the topic terms) were more likely to be considered high-quality metaphors. We discuss the implications of these findings for the (improvement of) automatic generation of metaphor by computers, for the persuasive function of metaphor, and for theories of metaphor understanding more generally.

Structured Abstract: Political Campaigning on Twitter—The Use of Language, Message Tone, and Implications for Political Marketing Communication from the UK General Election 2015

In recent years, the Internet has played a significant role in the success of election campaigns and influencing voters (Baines 2011). The use of social media in political marketing can facilitate bidirectional engagement between political parties and their audiences, although actual social media adoption by political parties is akin to prior, dissemination platforms (Larsson and Moe 2011). In the UK, the 2015 General Election became known as the ‘Selfie Election’, with party leaders engaging with the electorate through photographs shared across different social media platforms, especially Twitter (The Telegraph 2015). As parties further utilize social media for engagement with the electorate, and traditional media channels report social media posts as news, it becomes increasingly pertinent to understand the communication between political parties and the public in order to optimize our understanding of successful communication. For political parties this means the potential to address their message for effectiveness, for the public it means the ability to interpret opinion polls more fully alongside conversations that are occurring online in real time, and for wider knowledge this identifies the potential of Twitter posts for use as predictors to general election success.

I Want to ‘Share’ This Sexy Ad But My Boss Is Watching: Investigation into Behavior Associated with the Online Multiple Audience Problem

Social Network Sites (SNSs) have become deeply ingrained in the lives of their users. Since December 2012, Facebook comprises over one billion active members, approximately one in seven people on earth, with the demographic of users widening both geographically and across ages (Banks 2012). SNSs have changed the way marketers engage with consumers, allowing for multidimensional forms of communication (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Crucial to this paper is the dimension whereby marketers create value through engaging “customer-to-customer processes” (i.e., the sharing of commercial related content) (Pagani et al. 2011). Communication, both personal and brand related, contributes to the online self-presentation of users. This paper addresses the online multiple audience problem (OMAP) and its association with anxiety and impression management. OMAP is broadly defined as the simultaneous self-presentation of consumers in SNS to multiple audiences (family versus employers), with a single persona. Multiple audiences on Facebook complicate the goal of meeting audience expectations, as it is likely the audiences will hold heterogeneous expectations (e.g., close friends may expect sharing of alcohol related content but employers and parents may not) (Binder et al. 2009). Based on the assertion of long standing social theory of impression management (Leary 1996) when people feel their self-representation will, or has, become discrepant from the expectation of an audience, anxiety will arise and the individual will endeavor to manage their actions to reconcile the situation, and reduce cognitive dissonance. Such impression management can involve choosing not to share, or removing, brand or personal content that they deem to cause a discrepancy. Multiple audiences complicate this situation, increasing the chance of anxiety and impression management, as more expectations exist from which to become discrepant.