asist '13 annual meeting: interpersonal conflicts on facebook
DESCRIPTION
This was presented at ASIST '13 annual meeting (Montreal, Canada). Please contact me if you are interested in this paper.TRANSCRIPT
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The Show Must Go On: The Presentation of Self during Interpersonal Conflict on Facebook
Jinyoung Kim and June Ahn
College of Information StudiesUniversity of Maryland, College Park
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Conflicts happensImage source: Google ‘Facebook fights’
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Conflicts
1) Manifest : the state of heated argument, clashes, and insulting that develops
behavioral and affective states
2) Latent: the state of perceiving different goals and intentions of counterparts
(Dahrendorf, 1958)
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Conceptual Framework: Dramaturgy
Everyday life is a performance.In the presence of others, a person tries to give information about self in accordance with his/her intention. An audience is supposed to watch and be persuaded by the performance.Backstage is a private region where actors keep the vital secrets of the performance and refine themselves.
(Goffman, 1959)
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Visibility and relationship with an audience
encourage users to selectively disclose information to deliver an ideal self-‐image
while not creating conflicts with an audience.
Despite users’ efforts to avoid engaging in socially unattractive situations,
30% of adults experience conflicts in SNSs.
People from diverse contexts are present at the same place,
and this context collapse might affect users’ perceptions and behaviors
when encountering conflicts on Facebook.
(Rainie et al., 2012)
On Facebook,
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Research Question
RQ1. When do individuals experience conflicts on Facebook?
RQ2. What are the individuals’ thought processes in perceiving and
dealing with conflicts?
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Methodology
• An interview method
• 6 college and 10 graduate students
• Questions include:
What are the purpose of your using Facebook?
What are the episode of conflicts?
If the conflict was resolved, were you satisfied with the way how it was resolved?
• Themes and Findings were linked into conceptual framework
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Findings
Controversial topics -‐ Religion & Politics
Political discussion?
Asynchronous interactions allowed interviewees to back off from intense
discussion and to gather backup information for their argument.
RQ1. When do individuals experience conflicts on Facebook?
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Findings
Interviewees often experienced conflicts when confronted with
inappropriate manners in online conversation.
How appropriate is appropriate?
Each user had a different level of tolerance toward the same posting
RQ1. When do individuals experience conflicts on Facebook?
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“I wrote it to make people to think, ‘what is he writing?’ because I don’t tend to write much [on Facebook]. So if I write something, it might spark [questions]. Somebody might go like ‘what are you writing?’ and it gives me the opportunity like ‘oh, this is what’s happening in my country.” (Dave, graduate)
“It’s really fun to be the devil’s advocate and say something like [different from friends’ opinions]. I have a lot of liberal friends, and I have a lot of conservative friends, and so, it’s always very funny. When you start to comment, they all get it on it. It’s just very interesting.” (Mark, graduate)
Findings
RQ2. What are the individuals’ thought processes in perceiving and
dealing with conflicts?
The brave, the careful, and the inconsistent
“I feel like I tried to be more neutral about stuff on Facebook 'cause I don’t really want someone getting mad at me on whatever something I post.” (Jamie, freshman)
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“I think, if they [his friends] were being attacked, and I agreed with the person attacking them but I didn’t know them, a strange scenario. I, still would be stepping inside and ‘okay, you might think that, but don’t be rude about it, don’t attack them.’ Even if I don’t agree with my friend, I still want my friends not to be attacked.” (Chris, junior)
“I had a good friend who I was a friend of in high school. He made this comment on Facebook about [a social issue]. And he was kind of citing like [positions on the topic]. And he, I don’t know, his viewpoint surprised me a lot. Cause I thought I knew him? But apparently, this is very extreme point of view in my opinion? So I started arguing him about like, you know...” (Justin, graduate)
Findings
Shills or informants: Conflicts with close friends
RQ2. What are the individuals’ thought processes in perceiving and
dealing with conflicts?
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“Of course, I didn’t want to solve the problem and have the entire Facebook read [by others]. That makes no sense. So I emailed my friend, I messaged him, but actually, since I couldn’t find it [his number], I wrote him an email... I had to manage the situation offline.” (Dave, graduate)
“They are still friends in real life. They just blocked each other on Facebook, so they don’t need to deal with each other’s political [opinion].” (Steve, graduate)
Findings
Coping mechanism: backstage processes for deciding on further performances
but everyone responses like ‘you never gonna make Mark mad, you never gonna do it, it’s not gonna happened’. Cause most, I think most of the people understand that I’m not gonna get like… mad. So I mean, I look at getting mad someone has like…I don’t want people to know they’re gotten to me? So I’ll just, I’ll just suppress it? (Mark, graduate)
RQ2. What are the individuals’ thought processes in perceiving and
dealing with conflicts?
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Discussion
Facebook generally is not a platform for outward conflict.
But, the brave, the careful, and the inconsistent are connected to each other
on Facebook.
Actors manage their walls in accordance with their ideal-‐self by sterilizing
information for their front-‐stage performances on Facebook.
Once conflicts occurred, actors were careful to resolve the conflicts, reassure
the validity of previous performances to audiences, and stop further
disruptive interactions.
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Limitations & Future studies
Limitations
• Modest sample size
• Homogeneous group
Future studies
•Conflicts of users in a different life stage
• Conflicts on Different type of SNSs
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Thank you. Questions or Comments?
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