Zeynep Tufekci

I am currently circulating two of my papers, one pre-publication, one under review. I made the pre-publication paper available, but please do NOT cite without checking in with me. The second paper is under review. Email me at zeynep at umbc dot edu if you would like to receive a copy of that paper, or of my manuscripts in progress, listed at the bottom, when I start circulating them. My other papers are chapters in a forthcoming book; I will see about making them available.

Papers

Zeynep Tufekci. (Forthcoming). Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society. Available here.

 

Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites

The prevailing paradigm in Internet privacy literature, treating privacy within a context merely of rights and violations, is inadequate for studying the Internet as a social realm. Following Goffman on self-presentation and Altman's theorizing of privacy as an optimization between competing pressures for disclosure and withdrawal, we investigate the mechanisms used by a sample (n= 704) of college students, the vast majority users of Facebook and Myspace, to negotiate boundaries between public and private. We find little to no relationship between online privacy concerns and information disclosure on social network sites. Students manage unwanted audience concerns by adjusting profile visibility and using nicknames, but not by restricting the information within the profile. Mechanisms analogous to boundary regulation in physical space, like walls, locks and doors, are favored; little adaptation is made to the Internet's key features of persistence, searchability, and cross-indexability. We also find significant racial and gender differences.

Keywords: privacy, disclosure, social network sites, Goffman, Altman, presentation of the self, Facebook, Myspace

Zeynep Tufekci. (Under Review). Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace: What Can We Learn About Social Networking Sites from Non-Users

 

Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace: What Can We Learn About Social Networking Sites from Non-Users

This paper attempts to understand the rapid adoption of social networking sites by students on U.S. college campuses. Locating these online tools within the emergence of social computing, a conceptual distinction is made between the expressive Internet, the Internet of social interactions, and the instrumental Internet, the Internet of airline tickets and weather forecasts. Starting with the theoretical frameworks of Robin Dunbar and Erving Goffman, this paper situates the activity on these sites under two rubrics: 1) presentation of the self and impression management, and 2) social grooming. The study compares and contrasts user and non-user populations in terms of expressive and instrumental Internet use, friendship ties, attitudes toward social-grooming, general curiosity about people, enjoyment of keeping in touch and of social activities, concern for privacy, and other variables hypothesized to be linked to social network site adoption based on qualitative (n=35) and quantitative data (n=714). Three clusters are found to influence social network site adoption: disposition towards social grooming, disposition towards conformity, and privacy concerns. We especially find that non-users display an attitude towards social grooming (gossip, small-talk, and generalized, non-functional people-curiosity) that ranges from incredulous to hostile. Contrary to expectations, however, non-users do not report a smaller number of very close or somewhat close friends compared to users, but they do keep in touch with fewer people. Users of social networking sites tend to be heavier users of the expressive Internet, while there is no difference in non-social uses on the instrumental Internet, highlighting the need to differentiate between the different modalities of Internet use when examining social impacts. 

 

Keywords: social network sites, Goffman, Dunbar, presentation of the self, social grooming, Facebook, Myspace 

Manuscripts in Progress:

Tufekci Z.         On the Internet, Everybody Knows You’re a Dog: Presentation of Self for Everyday Surveillance. (Presented at American Sociological Association, 2007)

Tufekci Z., Cotten, S. Gender Differences in Computer Use and Perception Among Middle School Students.

Tufekci Z.         Gender and Social Network Sites: Yes, Women Communicating and Men Searching.

Tufekci Z.         Social Capital's New Face: Gender, Race and Ethnicity Differences in Social Capital Formation in Facebook, Myspace, and Other Online Social Networks.

Cotten, S., Tufekci Z., Anderson, W. Cell phone Usage and the Gender Gap in Digital Technologies Among Youth.