Hello everyone, my name is Ben and I am joined here with my collaborator Shanley.
We will go over our paper titled: Separate Online Networks During Life Transitions: Support,
Identity, and Challenges in Social Media and Online Communities.
In this paper, we explored a few aspects about networks of known ties and separate online
networks.
First, We explored the challenges people face in their online networks of known ties and
how those challenges can influence people to participate in separate networks.
We also investigate how social support and relationships take place and involve in these
separate networks.
And we look into how identity and identity change relate to people s experiences in online
separate networks.
This brings us to our key contributions:
From conducting 28 semi-structured interviews with participants who experienced a range
of major life events and transitions within the past two years, we first conceptualized
networks of known ties and separate networks in the context of life transitions.
Specifically, we define networks of known ties as both strong and weak ties that people
typically have pre-existing ties with and draw in during their everyday use of social
media while separate networks are different from and exist apart from network of known
ties.
We also focused on analyzing the use of online separate networks during life transitions
and identity changes.
Our work extends prior work that usually focused on a single life transition, so we provide
additional insights by examining life transitions holistically.
Additionally, we summarize people s social media-related challenges in both networks
of known ties and separate networks and offer an empirical description of why and how people
use separate networks across multiple types of life transitions.
Last, we discuss the importance of separate networks in facilitating life transitions,
and provide design recommendations to promote connection with separate networks to improve
people s online experiences across a wide range of life transitions.
In results, we first identified the different challenges people may face from networks of
known ties.
Networks of known ties are described to include both weak and strong ties that people typically
have pre-existing ties with and therefore draw in during their everyday use of social
media
The challenges people mentioned experiencing in networks of known ties included superficial
online support, negative life impacts, and positive online self-presentation.
For negative life impacts, for instance, participant 24, a father who came out as gay, made the
decision not to share about his coming out experience with networks of known ties as
he was concerned with the potential for his son to be negatively affected.
To avoid personal risks, he relied on Separate networks such as closed groups on Twitter
during his life transition.
The challenges Ben mentioned influenced some people to participate in online separate networks
which we define as networks that are different from and exist apart from one s primary network
of known ties.
In separate networks, people experienced receiving network support, receiving information support,
lurking in these spaces, and making virtual friends.
For lurkers and providing or receiving help, we found that there are different types of
lurkers which we call waiting contributors.
Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of lurkers as we divide them into two types
according to their reasons for lurking.
These are individuals who may be limited by differences in individual experiences or who
feel that they need time to grow before they can openly participate.
Participant 8, for example, said that they like to stick around in case they can help
or in case they might need support later, so they decide to lurk.
We also want to highlight the concept of virtual friends where we found it to be permeable
between different networks.
Virtual friends are people who experience highly similar life transitions which motivates
people to create virtual friendships and these frishships can become part of networks of
known ties later on.
Participant 26 for instance, joined an online community for people with addition where she
had met a girl with identical experiences like her; she describes how people in their
life such as their family didn t have the same experiences as them, so it was nice to
talk to someone who they met online and had very similar experiences.
As people encounter major life transitions, their identity can be impacted significantly.
To facilitate these experiences, individuals often present their identities differently
across different online social networks.
Our work also investigate how participants described their experiences in interacting
with separate networks based on their faceted identities or parts of their identities.
For instance, we found that Shared identity can bring comfort and Identity or identity
change experiences can influence participation in separate networks.
Participant 15, a graduate student who identified as a grad student, woman of color, crime victim
which are all salient parts of her identity, and she joined online support groups fItted
to these specific identities for social support.
As Shanley mentioned, online separate networks, which can include waiting contributors and
virtual friends, provide valuable support, but they could also introduce emergent challenges
such as access to specific separate networks and negative interactions with others within
the separate network.
To limit those emergent challenges, we discuss ways that separate networks across social
media sites can be designed to better support people during life transitions.
We include ways to make online communities more easily visible to social media users,
features that can be integrated into these communities such as indicating one s transition
stage and promoting contribution, and the potential of templates for online community
members to familiarize themselves with the online environment.
conceptualized the definition of networks of known ties and separate networks reaffirms
that they can be applied to multiple life events.
We identified challenges that people face in both types of online networks, and found
that separate networks mitigate some challenges present in networks of known ties that sometimes
hinder self-disclosure.
We provide novel insights into how separate networks can be better designed through enhancing
search function, integrating related features and providing context sensitive templates
to facilitate life transitions.