Public Friends and Private Sharing: Understanding Shifting Privacies in Sharing Culture

This paper seeks to address the tension between privacy and sharing culture. Despite many claims that privacy is dead, research suggests that there is a shift from privacy as an individualized right based around control to something more social, more embedded, more public and more networked. Drawing from seven media diaries, interviews with those diarists and a survey (N=270) of London, UK residents aged 18-36, we aim for a better picture of privacy and sharing culture as lived experiences. Based on this evidence, we identify a number of themes. First, privacy matters. Although respondents identify sharing as embedded and networked, their experiences and understanding of privacy remains more traditional. For most, privacy is an individualized right focused on control. In addition, we find several themes emerging from the data -- social privacy is more important than institutional privacy; younger respondents talk about "public friends" and "private sharing" to justify and explain their sharing practices; respondents also commonly talk about a 'persona' on social media profiles; and finally, respondents are increasingly depersonalizing what they share on social media. All of these themes point to ways that respondents exercise sharing strategies in part to protect their privacy, but also for managing the sharing expectations of their social media use and sharing culture more broadly.