Living a private life in public social networks: An exploration of member self-disclosure

In this article, the author is studying the phenomenon of voluntary self-disclosure on social networking sites. The degree of self-disclosure is important to the success of social networking sites, because self-disclosure enables dialogue with members, customization of services, targeted marketing, and generation of digital content. However, despite the desire to become sociable with the increasingly popular online community, members are often reluctant to disclose themselves. Utilizing the relevant literature, we developed a simple research model that identifies key stimuli and impediments to members' self-disclosure. These effects arise from personality traits (eg externality and privacy value), network service attributes (eg critical mass), and computing environment (eg internet risk). This survey model was verified by survey data collected from users of 222 social networking sites, and the results confirmed a virtual relationship. In the current survey, new knowledge about the role of various factors in forming members' self-disclosure is created and network service providers are also shown how to encourage their members to introduce themselves online .

► A positive attitude towards online websites is also actively related to self-disclosure. ► Personality is positively related to the positive attitude of online websites. ► Critical mass has a positive relationship with a positive attitude. ► Internet risk adversely affects the positive attitude of online websites. ► The value of privacy reduces the relevance between positive attitudes and self-disclosure

Rui Chen is an assistant professor of information systems at Ball State University. He received a doctorate. New York University Buffalo school specializes in management science and systems. His research focuses on information assurance, emergency management, emerging media, information technology capabilities, and information technology outsourcing. He has published over 50 research papers in various journals, conferences and books. His magazine publications include MIS Quarterly, Journal of Information Systems Association, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Information Systems, IEEE Professional Communications Exchange, Information Systems Association Communications, and ACM Communications. His research paper was published at several prominent information conferences held in seven countries. He is a coordinator of Information Systems Frontiers and has served as editor of various international conferences, committee members of the planning committee, and chair of the conference. He is a member of the Information Systems Association (AIS) and the decision support system AIS SIG.

Understanding interpersonal disclosure in online social networks is an ideal application for social networking theory. Researchers use SET to explain self-disclosure of French and British occupational experts in a cross-cultural context. They discovered that reciprocity is the main advantage of self-disclosure and that risk is the basic cost of self-disclosure. They found that the active social impact of using the online community increased self-disclosure of the online community, reciprocity increased self-disclosure, trust of the online community increased self-disclosure. At the same time, the tendency of collectivism has increased self disclosure. Similar studies have also been using SET to study privacy issues and interpersonal awareness to promote the use of self-disclosure techniques in instant messaging environments. This study is also a cross-cultural study comparing participants in the United States and China.

Self-disclosure has been studied as face-to-face dialogue. As social networking sites are relatively new, there are not so many ways to publish information online, compared to one-on-one interactions. It is investigated how social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, hi5, myyearbook, Friendster, etc. affect human dialogue. On Facebook, users can determine their level of self-disclosure by setting their own privacy settings (McCarthy, 2009). People achieve a comprehensive range of public and superficial information sharing about their daily lives while deepening intimacy by sending personal Facebook messages and creating private groups