The Imagined Audience on Social Network Sites

Abstract

When people construct and share posts on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, whom do they imagine as their audience? How do users describe this imagined audience? Do they have a sub-audience in mind (e.g., "friends who like reality television")? Do they share more broadly and abstractly (e.g., "the public")? Do such imaginings fluctuate each time a person posts? Using a mixed-methods approach involving a 2-month-long diary study of 119 diverse American adults and their 1,200 social network site posts, supplemented with follow-up interviews (N = 30), this study explores the imagined audience on social network sites. The findings reveal that even though users often interacted with large diverse audiences as they posted, they coped by envisioning either very broad abstract imagined audiences or more targeted specific imagined audiences composed of personal ties, professional ties, communal ties, and/or phantasmal ties. When people had target imagined audiences in mind, they were most often homogeneous and composed of people's friends and family. Users' imaginings typically fluctuated among these audience types as they posted even though the potential audience as per their posts' privacy settings often did not change. The findings provide a list of audience types, as well as detailed descriptions, examples, and frequencies on which future research can build. With people's online presence playing an important role for their reputations, these findings provide more insight into for whom people are managing their privacy and whom they have in mind as they share.

Privacy Literacy: From Theory to Practice

“…In recent years, problems related to privacy and social media sites have gained prominence in the scholarly literature (Dhir et al, 2016;Litt & Hargittai, 2016). With the proliferation of social media sites and mobile technologies, online communication has become routine.…”

Negotiating Multiple Audiences of L2 Learners on Facebook: Navigating Parallel Realities

“…There are many studies on the need for audience management strategies for L2 learners due to the collapsed contexts which forced L2 learners to face multiple audiences at the same time (Litt & Hargittai, 2016). It is essential for curriculum designers and educators to be aware of the strategies L2 learners adopt in navigating their multiple audiences on Facebook to design and implement learning activities on Facebook.…”

Social Theory after the Internet

“…On the other side, the 'audience' interprets the mediated and staged self in terms of participating in an interaction that is like a face-to-face encounter rather than passively watching a performance: this is so unless the 'audience' has no interaction with the person posting -as when a Facebook post is aimed at an 'imagined audience' (Litt and Hargittai 2016), but the post is never read. In this case, however, there is in fact no effect of the medium except on the person posting.…”

“…In a study by Litt and Hargittai (2016), in over half the posts participants said they were addressing an 'abstract' audience of anyone. However, just under half the posts had a target audience in mind, and most of these were addressed to 'personal ties'.…”