The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online
Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook’s audience had already broadened beyond its student roots: a 2007 account of parents joining Facebook and a profile of older users building Facebook networks showed that young users’ posts were reaching a less peer-only environment. At the same time, scholars were beginning to use Facebook as a source of data, as covered in researchers linking up with Facebook data.
The shift toward more selective self-presentation matters as Facebook plans Check-In and a Places tab: location and everyday status updates make the boundary between social sharing and personal exposure more consequential.
First-order effects
- Young Facebook users face a more deliberate choice about what to make visible as family members, older contacts, and other non-peer audiences occupy the same network.
- Facebook’s planned location features depend on users being willing to disclose more sensitive, real-world context than a conventional profile requires.
Second-order effects
- More guarded sharing reduces the pool of publicly available Facebook material that researchers had begun to use, pushing data collection toward information users still choose to expose.
- Location-focused services such as Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla gain a clearer point of competition: not only check-in features, but the degree of control users feel they retain over their whereabouts.
Third-order effects
- If selective sharing becomes a durable user norm, social platforms will compete on audience controls and contextual disclosure rather than treating a single public social graph as the default.
- The value of Facebook’s social graph for commerce and location services will increasingly depend on trust: broader data uses raise the cost of users withdrawing information from public view.
The trend: Social networking is moving from early, peer-oriented oversharing toward managed disclosure as audiences widen and platforms seek more personal data.