This is my thesis topic presentation. I'm planning to finish it in June 2013.

1. The “culture” of self-disclosure and
issues of relational privacy in
Facebook (gender implications)
Shushan Harutyunyan
Thesis topic presentation
18 March, 2013, CEU

2. Why this topic matters?
• World Wide Web - all the information ever tracked/appeared
is absolutely permanent
• Facebook - contributing to WWW with personally identifiable
information (PII)
• How? - based on “Web 2.0” concept of “democratized
participation”(collaborative medium for creating and sharing
any information one would like to)- GREAT!
• However in practice, Facebook is
doing nothing, but encouraging
users “democratized participation”
in contributing and spreading
entirely personal information – WAIT!
• WHY? -simply because
communication incentive is the
exchange of this kind of information.

3. Is there anything said about this and
what Am I doing?
• Facebook privacy policy studies- the right to provide
computerized analyses of users’ personal information to third
parties
• Case studies of laps in Facebook security system (Lane v.
Facebook class-action lawsuit)
• The problem of information/power
institution and new forms of total
surveillance (Facebook users’
personal information congestions at
the hands of a commercial
organization)
• What Am I doing? Individual users’
motives and experiences of
“collaborating” with Facebook and
consciously or unconsciously disclosing
own private information.

4. Why “self-disclosure”?
• the majority of Facebook users are aware of privacy risks (84
per cent), however, more than half of them (48 per cent) fail
to make any privacy adjustments at all
• Information disclosure on Facebook involves not only
individuals with their acknowledged or not acknowledged
interest to share personal information, but also the experience
to share the private information of users in relation as well -
with relationship identifications, “taggings” and other
common Facebook activities

5. What aims do I have?
• To understand why
Facebook users
disclose personal
information
• To understand what
gender implications
those motives and
experiences have

6. How am I hopping to contribute to gender studies
• I argue, that Facebook
challenges the very notion of
personal privacy and
public/private divide, which was
and is always in the centre of
personhood and is closely
related to socially constructed
norms and values of visible and
hidden aspects of human live in
its gender implications.
• Since Facebook is enormously
influential “place” I claim that it
accordingly influences human
lives and recreates a new notion
of personal privacy

7. My research questions include
• What is personal and informational privacy?
• What assumptions about it users possess?
• Are these assumptions gendered?
• What’s the line between public and private in Facebook?
• Do males and females interpret the same understanding of public/private
divide on Facebook?
• Do users feel strongly the need for controlling public/private appearance of
their Facebook activities?
• Why or why not?
• In what why and how intensively?
• Does the need for controlling or not controlling Facebook appearance have
gender implication?
• How users feel about the disclosure of their information by users in relation?
• Does the intensively of being targeted and disclosed by others have gender
meaning?
• Why do users voluntary disclose own private information?
• What implications the self-disclosure on Facebook have in everyday life of the
users?

8. Methods
Literature review
• legal scholarship about personal and information
• Anthropology, philosophy and gender literature about
individuality and public/private divide
• scholarly articles about user behavior and SNSs
• English language online newspaper reports about
Facebook “privacy” cases
• Focus group?
• To 3-4 focus groups with approximately 8 participants
each
• English speaking 18-50 year old users group (provisionally
CEU community).

9. Limitations
• Accountability
• Unexpected
results
• The luck of
literature
• I might find new
ones later on as
well ))

10. Thank you!