Doctoral Dissertation Research: Identity and Audience in Social Media

在过去的二十年里，技术的发展在人类交流的速度、规模和多样性方面取得了巨大的飞跃。然而，人类行为的变化速度要慢得多。在某些情况下，这造成了人们对传播媒体的看法与利用这些媒体的潜在影响之间的脱节。也许没有比像Facebook和Twitter这样的在线社交网站（SNS）更能说明通信技术在使用方面产生了一系列误解的了。围绕潜在或现实的隐私风险，通过这些网站接收信息的目标受众，以及在线信息传播的程度的困惑。人际关系正在渗透到线下？造成了一场完美的风暴，人们对如何在这些网站上描绘自己感到困惑。本研究的目的是评估隐私和社交媒体受众的概念如何影响社交媒体平台上的身份描述。在这项研究中，我将使用直接从两个最大的社交网站Facebook和Twitter收集的调查数据，测试一系列与隐私概念、目标受众和离线/在线背景潜在重叠相关的假设。付费广告将用于传播调查链接，让所有活跃用户都有机会回应调查。该方法避免了现有研究中使用方便抽样方法的缺点。这项研究更广泛的影响在于更好地理解个人是如何在离线和在线环境之间导航的。此外，这项研究可以为Facebook和Twitter等组织提供新的见解，以激励对社交媒体用户有益的变革。

Over the past two decades, technological developments have made huge leaps in the speed, scale, and diversity of human communications. However, changes in human behavior occur at a much slower pace. In some cases, this has created a disconnection between how someone might think about communications media and the potential implications of utilizing those media. There is perhaps no better example of communication technologies that have created an array of misconceptions about usage than online social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter. The confusion surrounding potential or real risks to privacy, the intended audience receiving communication through these sites, and the extent to which ?online? relationships are bleeding into relationships ?offline? have created a perfect storm where individuals are confused about how to portray themselves on these sites. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how conceptions of privacy and social media audiences affect portrayals of identity on social media platforms. In this study I will test a series of hypotheses related to conceptions of privacy, intended audience, and the potential overlap of offline/online contexts using survey data collected directly from two of the largest social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter. Paid advertisements will be used to disseminate links to the survey, giving all active users an opportunity to respond to the survey. This method avoids the shortcomings of existing studies of this topic, which tend to use convenience-sampling methods. The broader impact of this study lies in providing a better understanding of how individuals are navigating relationships between offline and online contexts. Further, this study can provide new insight to organizations such as Facebook and Twitter to motivate changes that would be beneficial to social media users.