Privacy has been defined by many scholars at different times. According to Westin (1967, p. 7) “privacy has been defined as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others”. Similarly, Rossler (2004) has suggested that people value privacy as it provides them with the ability to control their personal information and visibility.
The ‘public’ and ‘private’ dichotomy according to Weintraub (1997) “has been one of the grand dichotomies of Western thought and a point of departure for different types of analysis” (Weintraub, 1997, p. 1). Similarly, Bailey (2000) has defined this dichotomy as “fundamental ordering categories in everyday life where the private constitutes a realm of personal intimacy, of relationships which are to be defended from public scrutiny or interference, of values which cannot or should not be experienced in public life” (Bailey, 2000, p. 384). In her comprehensive examination of privacy and what is considered private in society, Helen Nissenbaum (2004) has suggested that for legal protection, privacy must be approached through the lens of contextual integrity.
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The term ‘public’ is defined in the literature, both as an adjective and as a noun. Habermas (1992) defines it as an adjective in opposition to ‘private’. As a noun, Livingstone (2005) has defined it as a “collection of people who may not all know each other, but share a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest” (Livingstone, 2005, p. 9). In relation to locations, it refers to places accessible to everyone in the society (Habermas, 1992), and in relation to a writer’s and performer’s audience, it refers to the strangers who are unknown but the audience for the performance or written content (Boyd, 2007).
Public and private boundaries have been blurred since the existence of SNSs in the lives of people; it has become more complicated to differentiate when a SNSs user is someone who is interested in sharing something that is seemingly private or when technology complicates people’s ability to manage privacy and visibility control (Boyd, 2010). By drawing on the concept of privacy, Grimmelmann (2009) has argued that SNSs blur the boundaries and the social dynamics of privacy by challenging one’s control over personal information accessible to others. However, in contrast, Boyd (2010) has argued that the use of SNSs and networked publics in general, is not a sign that people are not interested in controlling their privacy.
In part of her major study, Livingstone (2005) identified that “the public is quite similar to the audience, as both refer to a group bounded by a shared text, whether that is a world view or a performance” (p. 9). She further proposed a mediating domain – ‘civic culture’, or ‘civil society’– perhaps positioned between ‘the public’ and ‘the audience’ (Livingstone, 2005, p. 9). Furthermore, for the public in online settings, Boyd (2007) has suggested that in “SNSs and online settings, it is accepted to collapse the concept of public and the audience, or vice versa, as both mediated public and the audience are affecting the interaction environment. In another study, she has suggested that the architecture of the SNSs enables a distinction to be made between public and private, where ‘public’ means that a profile is visible to anyone and ‘private’ means that profile content is visible to ‘Friends-only’. However, the profile’s existence, once it is created by users, is visible for public viewing” (Boyd, 2010, p.46).
The relationship and distinction between public and private in SNSs has been widely investigated (Boyd, 2010; Ford, 2011; Jurgenson and Rey, 2012). Historical debates on public and private, and also the current understanding of it, have been integrated by Ford
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(2011). She has argued that SNSs users experience different levels of privacy depending on the methods of control they employ in the visibility of their information. She has proposed a continuum model instead of a simple dichotomy. In contrast to Ford (2011), Jurgenson and Rey (2012) have argued that privacy and publicity are interconnected and stated that “publicity and privacy do not always come at the expense of one another but, at times, can be mutually reinforcing” (p. 191). In Iran, where private activities online have public consequences for its citizens (BBC, 2012; BBC, 2014) and where private activity on SNSs is questioned and punished for its potential contribution to the public sphere, no realm of public or private life is free from official regimes of governance (Livingstone, 2005). In SNSs, privacy is about the individual’s ability to control or deny access to personal information (Solove, 2007). Privacy covers a variety of different issues and a single definition that effectively incorporates all the subtle differences that privacy evokes has so far proven impossible (McCullagh, 2008).
Although extensive research has been carried out on privacy in SNSs, no single study exists which adequately addresses how people can regain a sense of control in a society that is connected through SNSs (Boyd, 2010). This study aims to explore the participant’s self-presentation on Facebook and to understand how self-presentation on Facebook is shaped and managed by negotiating and controlling the blurred lines of what is considered as private and public in real life.
While a variety of definitions of the term ‘privacy’ have been suggested, this study will use the definition suggested by Rossler (2004) who has described it as one’s ability to control personal information’s availability and visibility to others in any given context. At the same time, it must be stressed that Boyd’s (2010) argument about the public and private distinction is valid for this study. She has stated that “public and private are certainly in flux, it is unlikely that privacy will simply be disregarded” (p. 54).
2.5.1 Online Studies and Public/Private Distinctions
Numerous scholars have addressed the dichotomisation of public and private within SNSs (Boyd 2007, 2008, 2010; Dwyer et al., 2007; Lange, 2007; Marwick, 2008; Stefanone and Jang, 2008; Stutzman and Hartzog, 2009; Hargittai, 2010). All of the above studies concur that individuals seem to be displaying much of their private lives in the public realm of the Internet. It has been argued that as Facebook provides space for different
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content to be shared, from one’s photo of a night out with a new partner, to workplace related information, the line between public and private is less clear (Boyd, 2008). Lange (2007) applied the idea of a public-private dichotomy to YouTube users, arguing that different types of behaviours exist, which she termed ‘publicly private’ and ‘privately public’ respectively. Similarly, Williams and Williams (2005) have used the idea of a dichotomy to study the private sphere in relation to mobile telephones. Lange (2007) argued that it is difficult to define public or private without referring to the other. In contrast Boyd (2007) has stated that what it means to be public or private is quickly changing through the disruption of everyday life by SNSs. Boyd (2006) has named the SNSs as another form of public space. Similarly, Benkler (2006) has argued that SNSs created a new model of public for communication that is characteristically more democratic because of its public nature. He argued that SNSs empower their users in authoritarian regimes, in comparison to old media in which citizens had no strong voice as these spaces are controlled by the regimes.