Hi, my name is Michal Luria, I'm a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University
and today I will present a short paper called "Hashtag Forget: Using Social Media Ephemerality to Support Evolving Identities."
This was done in collaboration with Nate Foulds and with Instagram Research at Facebook.
When we think about social media we frequently think about permanent content so
most of the content is content that you can access at any time that kind of permanently
stays on people's profiles. But in recent years we also have ephemeral content on social media
so platforms like Snapchat and Instagram introduce content that disappears after a set amount of time
usually 24 hours. So it's there for a while for people to observe but then it is gone.
When it was introduced it was also followed by research that looked at what this kind of content
introduces to interaction on social media. One of the things is that it allows people to
forget and be forgotten. Not everything that is on social media stays there forever.
As a result it also encourages more spontaneous sharing among individuals and finally it
even supports identity exploration to some extent because people do not have to commit to whatever
content they upload.
However prior work also shows that this kind of exploration of identity is
limited and that it doesn't fully seize its potential as an identity exploration platform.
And so in this work we ask how can social media platforms leverage ephemerality to better support
identity exploration, specifically among teenagers and young adults. To explore this question we
conducted an eight-day virtual diary study where participants were asked to upload diary entries
into a virtual platform every time that they post on social media or every time that they think
about posting on social media and to reflect on their experience and process of doing so.
We had participants from the US, Canada, Brazil, UK, and several more across the world and a total of
45 teenagers and young adults who participated in the study averaging at the age of 18.
I will present findings in two categories one is in the category of short-term ephemerality
which is ephemerality that is less than 24 hours and then the second category that
I will talk about is long-term ephemerality which is ephemerality that lasts more than 24 hours.
So that could be a few days or a few weeks or even a few months but still ephemeral content that
at some point disappears. For short-term ephemerality more than a quarter of participants
wanted to have an ephemerality option for sharing content that would last 6 to 12 hours.
The kinds of posts that people wanted this time for whatever content they shared
was mostly personal content so content that is about them, about what they're doing, about their environment.
It was also content that tended to be more "in the moment", so it was
more spontaneous than some of the content that they wanted to share for longer periods of time.
And the reasoning for wanting to share for 12 hours or less was mostly about having limited
exposure. Participants felt that 24 hours, the current standard time frame, ensures that
everyone will see it however 6 to 12 hours might be better at supporting content that they want
only their close friends or more organically close friends to be able to observe.
The design recommendation for short-term ephemerality is to have an option to share for 6 to 12 hours
because it can better support teenagers' and young adults' need to express their identities in new ways.
For long-term ephemerality our main finding was that participants expressed
a desire to have expiration dates for all social media content and so knowing that
all their content will disappear eventually allows people to avoid "deletion sprees", to worry about
what is online and what is out there and having to constantly maintain their content and to make sure
that it represents who they are.
Our recommendation for long-term ephemerality is to have an option
to set all content on social media to expire after some period of time and that would relieve
anxiety and cognitive load of constantly maintaining an up-to-date digital identity.
For more on this please see our paper or feel free to reach me at my email or twitter account. Thank you.