Contents and contexts

Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) provide new forms of communication, in which people routinely share personal information with a large audience. The goal of this research is to examine how a public context in which disclosures are revealed influences receivers' impressions of disclosure and a discloser on SNSs. The results of the original study reported in this paper indicate that publicly shared disclosures were perceived as less intimate and less appropriate than privately shared disclosures on Facebook, and perceptions of disclosure appropriateness mediated the effects of public/private contexts on social attraction for a discloser. The results inform research on social outcomes associated with SNS's use, as well as design considerations for privacy- and disclosure-related behaviors in social media.