Social networking, ethics and exploring boundary management

Developing best practice for the small world. (Lannin and Scott, 2013)

The Lannin and Scott (2013) paper is focused on the psychology community and how to navigate social media by interpreting the APA Ethical Guide in a different context. This paper is a brilliant read and spoke to me about the personal professional context. In particular it reflecting on the opportunities and challenges that are presenting in social media, as similar to those that small rural communities face. Close contact, small worlds, means that it is very difficult to separate out personal and professional completely. The paper sees this a ‘small world ethics’, and situated the dilemmas created where younger members don’t realise there are dilemmas, but older members can’t help as they have no experience of the technology. By drawing upon experiences of navigating in small rural communities, then they could draw lessons in how to navigate in the social networking world.This resonated with Scouting communities for me. Often part of the communities becoming extended families. How do we maintain boundaries when boundaries collide? They say it is naïve of us to think that our ‘private’ lives will never intersect with our professional lives.

Social networking, like rural communities, increase the incidental contact, self-disclosure (remember we said that social media by its nature is a self-disclosure environment) and multiple relationships. Small world ethical thinking means we need to have a heightened awareness that the environment may produce some ethical dilemmas and boundary violations.  So we need to assess the risks and rewards that online activity might have, but we (talking about psychologists) may also need to be upfront and honest about the potential roles, set expectations from the start.

The paper ends by discussing the potential for good practice. This includes boundary management, technical competence and professional/personal liability. It’s a good idea to have formal social networking policies in place, so that both parties know the terms of use, expectations and what they will and won’t do, bearing in mind informed consent (e.g. – the psychologist will not search for the client online). They consider potentially avoiding multiple online relationships with clients and maybe having professional and personal profiles. They also say that psychologists should develop technical competence before engaging with social media, just as they would understand the cultural content in any work they undertake.

So this paper was interesting for many reasons but there are two takeaways for me. The guidance and advise advocated is very similar to that that I give to volunteers. Understand, develop skills, and recognise the risks. More importantly, there is a lesson here about the fact that in life, sometimes there will be boundary violations – how we manage and deal with these is important. So maybe some of the messages that need to be added in, are about what happens if you think you have crossed a line. How to you deal with that.

What is a digital persona (de Kerckhove and Almedia, 2013)

The paper identifies the core identity, the person, and then persona, which are the roles, relationships, attributes and identifiers of our person. And these aspects are persona;, social, institutional, legal, scientific and technological.    

“..society, experts, institutions and groups are still in a fragile unconscious, or pre-conscious phase, regarding the nature of the digital persona; ethical and mature management of its features and the need to develop more comprehensive, ethical and friendly self-management tools."

Once again we see that digital communication changes private individuality into networked and connected community.

When worlds collide in Cyberspace (Ollier-Malaterre and Rothbard, 2013)

The final paper I looked at picks up on the idea of boundary management, and looked at the different ways that we manage social media from the other side. How does personal information effect others professional views of us. More can be found at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/social-media-social-minefield/ . Another fascinating read and it starts to get ‘under the bonnet’ of how interactions online can effect others perceptions of us, and our identities. The paper points out that we haven’t yet figured out how to manage our digital persona and there are no comprehensive frameworks to draw on. This is good news in some ways, as it means all those discussions I have been having at work, are still very much in their infancy.

The paper recognising that there can be a collision between professional and personal lives and social media use require boundary management and identity negotiation through the opportunities and challenges present, especially because of self-disclosure. This is about the consequences of the personal on the professional and it was good to read some of the positive effects rather than focusing on the negative!. The paper identifies four types of management behaviours: Open, audience, content, hybrid.

Boundary theory in social networking is driven by preferences for segmentation (how we divide up different aspects of our persona) versus the integration of personal and professional identities and our motives for self-enhancement or self-verification. Basically, when you come down to it, social media is all about ego, and so it focuses on what we want to tell people about us, or the identity we want to create – consciously or unconsciously). The paper also explained how the notion of boundary management came about in the 1960s where there was a clear idea that professional and personal were separate. Once again this adds some understanding in to why some of our older adults find social media so strange, as the concept of sharing personally information is not one that they grew up with. However social networking has become a key forum for developing and maintaining relationships, especially if as me, you are a relatively isolated practitioner in your context.

The danger is, that our self-disclosures online are an archive of information that is not tailored to a specific context or a particular relationship or situation, and so it’s original context and meaning can be lost. Here’s the outcome of their research:

de Kerckhove, D., & de Almeida, C. M. (2013). What is a digital persona?. Technoetic Arts: A Journal Of Speculative Research, 11(3), 277-287.

Lannin, D. G., & Scott, N. A. (2013). Social networking ethics: Developing best practices for the new small world. Professional Psychology: Research And Practice, 44(3), 135-141.

Ollier - Malaterre, A., Rothbard, N. P., & BERG, J. M. (2013). When worlds collide in cyberspace:How Boundary work in online social networks impacts professional relationships. Academy Of Management Review, 38(4), 645-669. 

Culture, Society and Identity

“..values are the primary motivational construct that influences almost every aspect of human life, guiding us to consider what is desirable then energising and directing behaviour towards attaining these goals..” (Suke, 2009)

I wanted to explore further the ideas around cultural identity and ethics, as this linked to my project premise about taking a values-based approach to digital inclusion. My assumption was that many of the discussions about identity, trust and safety are, and will continue to happen, but what we need to do is find the right ‘conversational frameworks’ with which to have these discussion. Originally I thought that I could just point people in the right direction and give them some top tips. But it has become clearer the more I have researched, that these are decisions that people have to make for themselves, but you can help them to have these conversations.

Suke (2009) paper was an interesting look at male cultural identity with students in china, and how the digital world might be changing their cultural values. Chen describes values as objects, conditions or characteristics that members of that society consider important. This is interesting in a Chinese context, as cultural values were formed from the traditional culture of china and the increasing globalised culture of the online world. Therefore these young men were interacting in two potentially different social environments and so it would be expected that this might alter their culture values.

The idea of cultural identity is also pick up in a paper by Cullen (2009), researching ideas of identity and information privacy in the context of New Zealand. Cullen notes that the concerns about privacy are different for different groups and reflect the cultural values and concepts of personal identity that people have. This difference in privacy concerns is also the basis for Lorenzen-Huber et al’s (2010) research on privacy and older aged adults. Their motivation was understanding whether privacy frameworks should be different for older aged adults, as their perceptions will be influenced by different psychosocial motivations.  They say that studies suggest that older adults are unconcerned about privacy related to data-collection and sharing and that their perceived risk is lower than the actual risk. They explored a five part privacy framework using a variety of practical experiments with older people.

• Seclusion (right to be left alone)
• Autonomy (right to self-determination)
• Property (right to determine use and dissemination of personal data)
• Spatial construct (physical and virtual boundaries)
• Data protection

They found that older adults were more concerned with emotional connections to family and friends, but particularly focused on independence and autonomy. Therefore they balanced privacy preferences against their desire for independent living, personal autonomy and satisfying relationships, and had little concern around the five areas of privacy. If devices were perceived as useful then they generally viewed them as acceptable, but they wanted to control the decision making.

What this starts to show us is that we need to understand identity and privacy as not universal. The concerns and approaches are not only different according to culture, but also to age. Therefore discussions and work with volunteers might need to be approached differently. One size won’t fit all, and the risks to one group may be different to those of another because of their perceptions.

The digital world and youth culture.

Discussions about the fragmented self are scattered around literature about the digital world and culture. Besley (2011) reminds us of Foucault’s view that our identities are not fixed but fluid. They change and develop over time in a fluid, dynamic and creative process. As Besley is reflecting on creative media and how this contributes to the wider ‘knowledge’ economy, the paper naturally explores identity with a personal and public dimension, and how the public dimension shapes our behaviour. Besleys notes that the digital identity can be more fragmented and more temporal, so we need to manage it more, although we tend to put our best side forward. Youth culture is often situated within the online world of content creation and participatory culture (affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving and circulations), and much of this makes us ‘media producers’.

KImmon’s (2014) focuses in on new media and the literacies that ensue. We need to have an understanding of the relationship between online participation and identity and also how the structure of social media spaces influence and shape identity. Gradinaru talked about ‘context collapse’ in the sense that it is hard for us to figure out what context we are in, but as Belk pointed out, social media context afford certain characteristics, like more self-disclosure. Therefore, according to Kimmons social networking sites have their own cultures and norms that force us to behave in certain ways, making it difficult to express ‘authentic’ identity. It is also easier to misinterpret identity through online information as it often doesn’t go deeper into the whys and whats of what we are expressing. Therefore (back to Foucault), identity is fluid and shaped by the context of the media we participate in. Which is not a new idea, as we behave differently at work, as we might at home, and so forth.

“…we need to empower learners to participate in SNS in ways that are meaningful and truthful for them, but do not reduce identity to the strict confines of the medium”. (Kimmons, 2014)

Besley, T. (2011). Digitised youth: Constructing identities in the creative knowledge economy. Annals Of Spiru Haret University, Journalism Studies, 12(1), 9-22.

Cullen (2009) Culture, identity and information privacy in the age of digital government.  Online Information Review, 33(3), 405-421.

Lorenzen-Huber, L., Boutain, M., Camp, L. J., Shankar, K., & Connelly, K. H. (2011). Privacy, Technology, and Aging: A Proposed Framework. Ageing International, 36(2).

Kimmons, R. (2014). Social Networking Sites, Literacy, and the Authentic Identity Problem. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning, 58(2), 93-98.

Suke, C. (2009). College Male Students' Cultural Value Identity in the New Media World. China Media Research, 5(4), 41-46.