Bounded Social Media Places

Abstract

In this dissertation, I focus on places within social media that facilitate private communication with intended audiences. This includes private messaging, groups and servers within mobile and channel-based messaging services and social media platforms. I label these bounded social media places (BSMPs) and conceptually distinguish them from public elements of social media (PESM), which include algorithmically-controlled content feeds and public groups, profiles, and pages. Through interviews with users of diverse BSMPs (N=35) and an experiment on information credibility evaluation (N=240), I also empirically examine how people perceive, use, and are impacted by BSMPs. I find that BSMPs are used to communicate with both interpersonal ties and others with shared interests, while PESM are viewed as algorithmically-curated entertainment spaces for passive content consumption. In terms of affordances, BSMPs discourage visibility as content is restricted to intended audiences, encourage personalization as users believe they receive relevant content from and can send relevant content to specific individuals or groups, and encourage synchronicity as they facilitate continuous conversations. These affordances contribute to BSMPs being viewed as intimate, as conversations within these places feel authentic and similar to face-to-face interactions. These affordances also inform the heuristics people rely upon for information credibility evaluation, resulting in BSMPs being associated with interpersonal trust and familiarity. Combining these interview insights with findings from the experiment reveals that the perceived intimacy of BSMPs explains why some view information shared on BSMPs as more credible. These findings allow me to make multiple contributions to scholarship and practice. First, conceptually distinguishing between BSMPs and PESM clarifies social media scholars’ object of study and provides language that can be used in public discourse to highlight that social media consists of both BSMPs and PESM, which are associated with different outcomes. Second, highlighting how BSMPs’ affordances operate facilitates durable theorizing as scholars can draw on this work when new BSMPs emerge. Third, while scholars have merely described BSMPs as intimate and speculated that this results in users trusting information within these places, I demonstrate that perceived intimacy is the mechanism that explains why people view information shared on BSMPs as credible.