Time Collapse in Social Media: Extending the Context Collapse

Abstract

Unlike the typically anonymous online social environments of the 1990s, characterized by a nickname culture and a freedom to engage in changing identity games (Bechar-Israeli, 1995), modern social media profiles are often non-anonymous, with users revealing their real offline identities (Zhao, Grasmuck, & Martin, 2008). While Facebook and Google+ enforce real-name policies that require users to use their real names, Twitter and Instagram do not impose strict namerelated rules. Still, many users choose to disclose their full names on these social media platforms (Kaarakainen & Hutri, 2016; Peddinti, Ross, & Cappos, 2014). Thus, many social media users-including, in particular, Facebook users-have now chronicled a decade or more of their lives online, with digital traces linked to their past identities available to their friends and acquaintances. In this article, we argue that the advent of non-anonymous social media has changed the contextual conditions for socializing and self-performance (Zhao et al., 2008), as well as how users perceive time. According to Schoenebeck, Ellison, Blackwell, Bayer, and Falk (2016), existing work on social media has tended to focus on their "newness" and the ways in which content posted to social media portrays the current moment. However, to a large degree, modern social media may also capture, archive, and make semi-publicly or publicly available a history of the self. Current studies have not investigated how self-identity is an entity in progress in relation to social media performance over time. This research, therefore, lacks knowledge of how the nature and experience of time in social media might influence users' self-performance and participation. In particular, younger users born after 1990, or "social media natives," who have grown up with social media like Facebook, may experience that their life and identity transitions are marked by different self-performance practices in social media from their early youth to their young adulthood. Since identity is not completely stable over time, it is reasonable to assume that users will become cautious of the 763349S MSXXX10.

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

“…In this study, we focus primarily on how young adults have experienced Twitter, Facebook and Instagram over time because these are the most used social media platforms. We further label the young adults who participated in this study as social media natives (Brandtzaeg & Lüders, 2018;Brandtzaeg, 2016) because they have uploaded and published content on these social media since they were young teenagers. As such, these young adults represent the first generation that has experienced the important transition from youthful student to professional not only offline but also online, which makes them an important group to study.…”

“…This take on the lowest common denominator may even be more relevant in contemporary social media, which store searchable traces of people's social lives and their expressions of online self-presentation Running head: From Youthful Experimentation to Professional Identity 10 10 over time, from youth to adulthood. Facebook, for example, encourages users to be nonanonymous and to have a persistent identity over time (Brandtzaeg & Lüders, 2018).…”

“…These quotes not only describe a paranoid feeling about past self-generated content, but they also reveal an experience of lack of individual control due to a private/public context collapse (Vitak, 2012) and, more specifically, context collisions or unintentional collapsing of contexts (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014 The above quotes and concerns, such as those about nude photos, fall under our label of "time collapse." While the private/public context is well known from previous research (Livingstone, 2008), we use the phrase time collapse to refer to how the context in social media may mix and muddle the time boundaries between past and present (Brandtzaeg & Lüders, 2018). Our participants described their experiences of this muddling of time through their concerns about negative reactions to old content.…”

“…boyd, 2015; Livingstone, 2008;Niemann-Lenz, 2018;Thomas et al, 2017;Pitcan, Marwick & boyd, 2018). Still, researchers have little understanding of the influence of online self-presentation in young people's lives (Gardner & Davis, 2013), due to the complexity of time-stamped life-logs and the changing nature of social media (Brandtzaeg & Lüders, 2018). One such issue is how young people's use of social media for identity construction over time affects their online self-presentation, in particular during the identity transition from youth to professional.…”

Reframing Current Debates on Young People's Online Privacy by Taking into Account the Cultural Construction of Youth

“…Moreover, social media, such as Facebook, perpetuate the experience of linearity by confronting people with a chronological structure and showing them 'memories' from the past. Brandtzaeg and Lüders [68] found that this confrontation causes a "time collapse" in which young people feel embarrassed by their seemingly 'younger' selves. On the other hand, youths act upon these structural forces as cultural agents and have proven to be highly influential in how society and technology takes shape [11].…”