Unpacking the Paradoxes of Privacy in CMC Relationships: The Challenges of Blogging and Relational Communication on the Internet

In a recent posting, a parent uploaded and tagged a picture of their 18 year old son as a little boy dressed in a tutu. Once tagged, the photo became accessible to the son's entire Facebook friend network with a corresponding newsfeed of the action. The mortified son quickly responded to the posting by untagging and disassociating the image from his identity. He also made it clear to his parents that there needed to be a mutually agreed upon posting criterion with his parents so this kind of privacy invasion did not occur again. As this example illustrates, privacy management is a challenging enterprise with social media such as Facebook. While the creation of personal-journal diary blogs, social networking, and Twitter sites provide users multiple opportunities to engage in computer-mediated communication (CMC), privacy , communication, and technology are interwoven in critical ways. boyd and Ellison (2008) define a social network site (SNS) through three criteria (1) construction of a profile in a system that can be bounded or restricted if desired, (2) inclusion of others with whom they share some type of connection, and finally (3) viewership and surfing capabilities among the list of contacts if desired. Concerning this definition of a SNS, Beer (2008) contends that it potentially hides differences within the applications and notes that " we should be moving toward more differentiated classifications of the new online cultures not away from them " (emphasis original, p. 519). A critical aspect of these networks is to uncover the online cultural values concerning privacy. An alternative to highlighting the similarities and differences in these SNSs is to consider variations in disclosure and privacy management practices. There are many variations in the way people, both young and old, tend to manage protection of their private information when using social network sites in general. For some, privacy boundaries are very closed (creating thick, impermeable