Public Intimacy: Disclosure Interpretation and Social Judgements on Facebook

After reading the article by Bazarova, I found it very easy to understand and relate to. She discusses her research that examines how sociotechnology shape interpretation of disclosure and social judgments on social networking sites such as Facebook. I would say that the author's perspective on the media is accurate, and she defends it well providing 2 different studies with stats to back it up. The first study experimented with how  a private and publicly shared post on Facebook influenced intimacy. She had two hypothesis, the first Facebook disclosures shared in private would be interpreted as more intimate than Facebook disclosures shared through status updates and wall posts. The second hypothesis was that the Facebook disclosures who shared privately suggest greater relational intimacy between discloser. In my opinion, I thought that interactions between dicloser and receiver would be more intimate in private, the results showed that true. In study two, Bazarova expanded on study 1 and it showed how important the level of attraction and social attraction was. Together, the research and results show how sociotechnical affordances of technology create a new ways for making judgments and how appropriate and personal disclosure is. The reading brought up many topics amongst our class for discussion such as why our generation values approval from others on social media. Such as the importance of the number of people who write on your wall on your birthday or the idea of a relationship not being official till it is posted on Facebook. I think that true intimacy cannot be achieved on social networking sites, although they do allow you to stay connected to people. I still am unsure as to why our generation craves affirmation from social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.