Online Self-Presentation: Balancing Privacy Concerns and Impression Construction on Social Networking Sites

Abstract

Reaching the milestone figure of 500 million members in July 2010, the growth of the social networking site Facebook has rapidly accelerated. Currently, its membership figures would make it the third largest country in the world, suggesting that participation in online social networks has become more than a cursory phenomenon. Members of Facebook are required to create an individualized online profile that provides information about themselves, their physical appearance, individual tastes, and preferences (see Liu 2007; Liu et al. 2006), and that highlights certain aspects of their own personality. By means of these features, users inevitably construct and manage impressions of their self. Research has already shown that such a personal webpage even allows a more detailed self-presentation than a casual face-to-face interaction and that people indeed make use of it in order to emphasize certain aspects of their “true” self (Bargh et al. 2002; Haferkamp and Krämer 2010). Additionally, empirical findings indicate that social networking sites (SNSs) are not only a potential means for self-presentation but that people are indeed highly motivated to use this new arena for presenting themselves (Haferkamp and Krämer 2010). In doing this, they even adopt profile elements that have originally been provided for other purposes (e.g., people become a member of a group in order to display their attitudes and interests instead of in order to communicate with others, Haferkamp and Krämer 2009). This tendency might be due to the fundamental motive of every human being to present him/herself in a positive way and, in doing so, gain positive reactions from those forming an impression (Leary 1995; Leary and Kowalski 1990).