Social Media Presence and Privacy

One of the articles I read this final week of the summer Web 2.0 course was actually written by two Florida State professors from the Instructional Systems program: Vanessa Dennen and Kerry Burner. The journal article Identity, context collapse, and Facebook use in higher education: putting presence and privacy at odds is from 2017 in Distance Education's online journal. This was interesting reading following a previous week in our course already discussing context collapse (an idea referring to how a personal identity can overlap in social, professional, and educational spheres, etc.)

One of the points initially expressed is that the findings of their study related to how college student participants viewed using Facebook-- specifically whether it was for social or more academically focused purposes. The study followed how students felt this social network could support personal and social identity for performance in learning and interaction with classmates and instructors. It appeared that their findings showed what I also expected to be the case: students had mixed feelings about Facebook being used formally in a school context. I tend to use Facebook primarily for interacting socially with friends and family first, then some selectively more professional or academic interactions follow up afterwards.

Online social presence and identity is certainly something that individuals choose (or not) to regulate for specific settings and purposes, depending on their different environments and networks. This idea of context collapse is supported by the journal article's description of how students would alter their privacy settings and censor their Facebook content to avoid an overlap occuring among different social or academic networks. "Students may use Facebook to support informal learning, but view it primarily as a social tool (Madge, Meek, Wellens, & Hooley, 2009)." I know many people who feel this way as well and agree there is value in personally monitoring what and how much is being posted within your online accounts.