Open AccessPerforming for one’s imagined audience: Social steganography and other privacy strategies of Estonian teens on networked publics
Author(s) -
Egle Oolo,
Andra Siibak
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
cyberpsychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.85
H-Index - 23
ISSN - 1802-7962
DOI - 10.5817/cp2013-1-7
Subject(s) - internet privacy , publics , anonymity , order (exchange) , advertising , public relations , psychology , political science , sociology , computer science , business , computer security , politics , law , finance
The aim of the paper is to analyse the perceptions Estonian 13-16-year-olds have about privacy and imagined audience on SNS, blogs and Instant Messenger. Semi-structured interviews (N = 15) were carried out to explore the various privacy strategies teens implement in order to manage their extended audience. The findings indicate that the majority of the teens in the sample had misperceptions about the size of their online audience. Furthermore, many of them seldom thoroughly thought about possible privacy issues when communicating on mediated publics. Although several of our interviewees confessed that they only kept the members of the “ideal audience”, i.e. close friends and schoolmates, in mind while publishing posts, others claimed to be “performing” somewhat differently in front of extended audience. Our results therefore challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about privacy and are not engaged in navigating privacy, as three main privacy strategies – strategic information sharing, self-censorship and social steganography – were implemented by the young interviewees.