Playful Backstalking and Serious Impression Management

Abstract

Parents, educators, and policymakers have expressed concern about the future implications of young people's sharing practices on social media sites. However, little is known about how young people themselves feel about their online behaviors being preserved and resurfaced later in adulthood. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 college-going, primarily female, young adults about their use of social media and their transition from adolescence into young adulthood. We find that participants recognize archival value in their own Facebook histories, despite sometimes perceiving these histories to be embarrassing. They experience tensions between meeting their current self-presentational goals and maintaining the authenticity of historical content. To reconcile these tensions, they engage in retrospective impression management practices, such as curating past content. They also engage in "backstalking" behaviors, in which they view and engage with other users' Facebook historiesopenly with close ties and discreetly with weak ties. We consider this ludic engagement through the lens of emerging adulthood and discuss the theoretical implications of our findings, especially in light of emerging applications which intentionally resurface digital traces.

“The Question Exists, but You Don’t Exist With It”: Strategic Anonymity in the Social Lives of Adolescents

“…There is some evidence that social media platforms can potentially support adolescents' identity development processes, in that they enable users to engage in textual and visual self-expression and experiment with provisional identities, such as "college student" (Morioka, Ellison, & Brown, 2016). However, the identity structures of current social media platforms present challenges for adolescent users in particular: Schoenebeck, Ellison, Blackwell, Bayer, and Falk (2016) surface tensions between young adults' self-presentation goals on Facebook in the present day and the persisting archive of personal content they posted to the site as teenagers, particularly as applications intended to resurface prior social media posts (e.g., TimeHop) gain in popularity. The persistence, visibility, and searchability of personal data allow platforms like Facebook to become what Zhao et al (2013) refer to as "long-term identity 'exhibitions'" (p. 1), requiring users to practice proactive impression management strategies that may inhibit adolescents from comfortably experimenting with self-expression on these platforms during this critical developmental period.…”

From Youthful Experimentation to Professional Identity: Understanding Identity Transitions in Social Media

“…As such, online self-presentation must also be seen as a threat to people's social and historical experience of privacy. According to Schoenebeck et al (2016Schoenebeck et al ( : 1475 "parents, educators, Running head: From Youthful Experimentation to Professional Identity 5 5 and policymakers have expressed concern about the future implications of young people's sharing practices on social media sites".…”

Timeline Drawing and the Online Scrapbook

“…However, there has been prior work in which researchers and participants have engaged in collaborative viewing of the Facebook timeline. Schoenebeck, Ellison, Blackwell, Bayer, and Falk (2016) have observed that the Facebook timeline, introduced in September 2011, allows users to move quickly and chronologically through their own historical content to revisit past posts and relive memories, and in so doing, lowered the social and technical barriers to perusing past activities on the site.…”

“…There is considerable research on how people use social media such as Facebook, including studies that have employed visual elicitation by asking participants to view their Facebook displays with the researchers. These studies examined how people employed Facebook for impression management and archival purposes and argued that digital traces have great potential for supporting self-reflection and reminiscence (Schoenebeck, Ellison, Blackwell, Bayer, & Falk, 2016;Zhao et al, 2013). Social media research has increased greatly over time, and studies employing qualitative and mixed-methods have generally been conducted with well-established methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, or content analysis (Snelson, 2016).…”