Several longitudinal studies have tracked the increasing rate of adult participation with social media, and while we know that adults are engaging and disclosing online, we do not know what they are disclosing, nor how they use it to manage their personal and professional lives. Unanswered questions include:
- Which types of disclosures do adult users of social media make and do they differ from the disclosures made in face-to-face communication?
- How do social media users navigate the boundaries between public self and private self when making disclosures?
- Which types of disclosures facilitate personal and professional relationships?
- What role does gender and one’s sense of identity play in the types of disclosures that are made online?
- How do mobile phones interact with the type and frequency of social media disclosures?
In my thesis, I will present an interpersonal communication framework for exploring a popular social media platform and the types of private information made public by its adult users. Of particular interest will be the variance in self-disclosures made across the dimensions of gender (male or female) and identity (parent or professional). Petronio’s (2002) Communication Privacy Management theory has been selected to provide the theoretical framework for this study, as it “gives meaning to common everyday practices of managing the dialectic of private disclosures” and provides a “vocabulary to reflect and articulate choices people make when regulating their privacy” (p. xviii).