Boundary regulation in social media

TLDR

Managing group context in social media is a key design challenge, yet focusing solely on privacy ignores other important practices. The authors aimed to understand how users manage group context by exploring multiple profile management practices in social media. They investigated this by examining users’ use of multiple profiles across social media platforms. The study found that users employ creative strategies for group context management, driven by privacy, identity, utility, and propriety, forming a continuum of boundary regulation behaviors—pseudonymity, practical obscurity, and transparent separation—which designers should consider.

Abstract

The management of group context in socially mediating technologies is an important challenge for the design community. To better understand how users manage group context, we explored the practice of multiple profile management in social media. In doing so, we observed creative and opportunistic strategies for group context management. We found that multiple profile maintenance is motivated by four factors: privacy, identity, utility, and propriety. Drawing on these motives, we observe a continuum of boundary regulation behaviors: pseudonymity, practical obscurity, and transparent separation. Based on these findings, we encourage designers of group context management systems to more broadly consider motives and practices of group separations in social media. Group context management systems should be privacy-enhancing, but a singular focus on privacy overlooks a range of other group context management practices.