Light and Dark? Maybe grey...

Photo: flo222 / Pixaby License

I've been spending time over the last few days thinking about the "light and dark" discussion this week and in particular some of the responses made by participants in the Adorjan and Ricciardelli (2019) article. What I found interesting is that participants didn't fall completely on either side of the argument. Instead they were much more nuance, and context and platform made a huge impact on how they opted to deal with their privacy. It seems as though modern users don't really fit what either of the Zuckerburg or Poole quotes suggest.

The participants gave some interesting insights which are totally accurate. They've opted to move away from platforms like Facebook because it's been overrun with their older relatives and not "their" place to socialize any more. The more Facebook has become ubiquitous and unfortunately almost a necessity to keep in touch with certain people, the more it's pushed the younger demographics away in favor of platforms they feel are more their own and where they can potentially be more authentic. There wasn't one answer when it came to oversharing vs not, publishing content vs not but was instead entirely platform dependent. Not only was it platform dependent but also even profile dependent and I was reminded of reading several articles about "Finsta" accounts (Kang & Wei, 2020) where individuals would public some content on a public account, and different content for a smaller group of close peers. This again demonstrates there is not a blanket "I share everything and am entirely truthful" or "I am secretive, share nothing and conceal" but more of a well planned and considered series of questions like "who will and can see this" "what do I want this group of people to see" "who uses this platform."

As a bit of back story, I was a pretty early adopter of a lot of internet communications so I remember a time when we would dial into a BBS, communication entirely on message boards and forums. Then moving into very early chatrooms on servers around the internet. Surprisingly there actually was a pretty big IRC culture in the 90s in Cape Breton, not sure exactly how it got started but most of my junior high and high school had an IRC client and would regularly connect to some local servers and channels. For a time when internet communication was still very much "nerdy" most of my peers knew how to connect to a server's IP, log into a room, use some commands like /whois /ping etc. I also still remember my ICQ UIN, and making a MySpace as soon as it was available. At the time, especially for my age group and social circle, most of us shared whatever we could. We definitely overshared mostly because we could and the more information you shared the easier you could connect with others. I even recall being able to set up a local IRC "share" with a plugin to give access directly to a portion of your hard drive and what every you had in your shared folder. This was pretty common at the time for sharing photos, music, etc. and was probably a huge security vulnerability in retrospect. I'd like to see what taking a 2022 teenager and putting them into the late 90s to see how they'd handle it, both in terms of the tech use and what they opt to share and engage with.

Anyway, basically I've found it pretty interesting that 1. modern adolescents

are pretty savvy with what they do and don't share depending on the platform (and are pretty clever when it comes to making alternate accounts) and 2. that we've come a long way with internet based communication platforms, and with it users that are very comfortable adapting to those platforms and end up not "faking everything" but also not being "totally anonymous" and end up, overall, somewhere in the middle, grey.

Adorjan, M., & Ricciardelli, R. (2019). A New Privacy Paradox? Youth Agentic Practices of Privacy Management Despite “Nothing to Hide” Online. Canadian Review of Sociology, 56(1), 8–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12227

Jin Kang & Lewen Wei (2020) Let me be at my funniest: Instagram users’ motivations for using Finsta (a.k.a., fake Instagram). The Social Science Journal, 57(1), 58-71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soscij.2018.12.005