"I'll press play, but I won't listen"

Abstract

We offer the concept of profile work to illustrate the effort people invest in their public profiles in social network services (SNSs). In our explorative study, we investigated profile work in Last.fm, an SNS that automatically publishes music listening information. We found that, instead of simply not publishing things they might rather keep private, users tend to change their music listening behavior in order to control their self-presentation. Four dimensions of profile work were identified, including detailed mechanisms to regulate one's profile. We suggest ways to support users' profile work in the context of automated sharing of behavior information.