On Violating One’s Own Privacy:N-adic Utterances and Inadvertent Disclosures in Online Venues

Abstract

Blogs, regularly updated online journals, allow people to quickly and easily create and share online content. Most bloggers write about their everyday lives and generally have a small audience of regular readers. Readers interact with bloggers by contributing comments in response to specific blog posts. Moreover, readers of blogs are often bloggers themselves and acknowledge their favorite blogs by adding them to their blogrolls or linking to them i n t h e i r p o s t s . T h i s p a p e r p r e s e n t s a s t u d y o f b l o g g e r s " o n l i n e a n d real life relationships in three blog communities: Kuwait Blogs, Dallas/Fort Worth Blogs, and United Arab Emirates Blogs. Through a comparative analysis of the social network structures created by blogrolls and blog comments, we find different characteristics for different kinds of links. Our online survey of the three communities reveals that few of the blogging interactions reflect close offline relationships, and moreover that many online relationships were formed through blogging.

Embodied versus Disembodied Information: How Online Artifacts Influence Offline Interpersonal Interactions

“…Abductive analysis allows insights from the literature (existing theories), and new concepts to be developed in order to account for puzzling empirical findings. Current theoretical ideas on online disclosures, such as “context collapse” (boyd ), “contextual integrity” (Nissenbaum ) and “ n ‐adic interaction” (Tian and Menchik ) are used as the tentative analytic frameworks, which summarize theoretical establishments on empirical phenomena, and isolate puzzling events. To avoid essentializing current categorizations (Murphy and Dingwall ), I verified the research findings against the analytic frameworks and found that surprisingly, even when the students assumed that they shared with everyone on their online contact list, they still encountered breaches offline.…”

Audience Design and Context Discrepancy: How Online Debates Lead to Opinion Polarization

“…The situation is similar to an n ‐adic interaction (Tian and Menchik ) but with some distinctive variations. On other online platforms, the messages of senders are posted on their own page and situated in their own series of disclosures.…”

“…To remedy context discrepancies, many users resort to three strategies to make better sense of Weibo conversations: (1) sharing personal experiences, (2) adding situational elaborations, and (3) calling for solidarity with like‐minded individuals. While these strategies can be observed in both online and offline communications, they are much more crucial on Weibo, a platform largely deprived of traditional FTF communication, because of the invisibility of its online audience and the n ‐adic structure of online conversation (Tian and Menchik ). Tian and Menchik () coined the term “ n ‐adic” interaction to indicate any particular moment when the discloser does not know the exact number of their interactants.…”

“…While these strategies can be observed in both online and offline communications, they are much more crucial on Weibo, a platform largely deprived of traditional FTF communication, because of the invisibility of its online audience and the n ‐adic structure of online conversation (Tian and Menchik ). Tian and Menchik () coined the term “ n ‐adic” interaction to indicate any particular moment when the discloser does not know the exact number of their interactants. The concept “n‐adic” evolves from “dyadic” and “triadic” interactions, emphasizing the effect of the number of interactants.…”

“…Tian and Menchik () further pointed out that people are interacting with unknown interactants online. In FTF interaction, recognizing the identity of one's audience comes about naturally as situations shift.…”