Identity Management: Multiple Presentations of Self in Facebook Joan Morris DiMicco, David R. Millen IBM T.J. Watson Research One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02139 US joan.dimicco@us.ibm.com, david_r_millen@us.ibm.com ABSTRACT As the use of social networking websites becomes increasingly common, the types of social relationships managed on these sites are becoming more numerous and diverse. This research seeks to gain an understanding of the issues related to managing different social networks through one system, in particular looking at how users of these systems present themselves when they are using one site to keep in contact with both their past social groups from school and their current social connections in the workplace. To do this, we examined online profile pages and interviewed employees at a large software development company who frequently use the website Facebook, a site primarily used by college students and young graduates transitioning into the work force. The outcome of this initial case study is a framework for understanding how users manage self-presentation while maintaining social relationships in heterogeneous networks. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. General Terms: Human Factors Keywords: Social computing, online communities, identity, social networks, workplace. 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years there has been a proliferation of social networking websites available on the internet for maintaining friends and colleagues. The most popular include Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites allow for users to generate lists of individuals they know and use the sites to share messages, photos, and other media with each other. When each of these sites launched, it tailored its content and user experience to a particular audience: towards teenagers on MySpace, college students on Facebook, and high-tech professionals on LinkedIn. Yet as these sites have expanded and generated broader appeal, and as the users of these sites have transitioned between life stages and expanded their number of social connections, these sites are now assisting users in maintaining numerous social networks and diverse social relationships. A particular aspect of this issue we are interested in is when individuals transition from college into the workforce and expand their offline social circles to include a broader range of people. We are interested in answering the question of how these users continue to use social networking tools to support their diverse set of friends on sites that were originally designed for a single type of social network. The site Facebook is very popular amongst college-aged students – over 80% of students at US universities have registered profile pages [1, 3]. As these Facebook users have graduated from college and joined companies as full-time employees, they continue to use Facebook on a regular basis. As has been demonstrated with college students using the site to keep in touch with current college friends and past high school acquaintances [4], we suspect that graduated students use the site to maintain social connections with current coworkers and past college friends. As evidence to support this, as of May 2007, there were over 14,000 Facebook users who identified themselves as employees at our company, IBM. By registering as part of the IBM network, these users are able to view the profiles of other registered employees, and they are making their profile pages visible to other employees. When a user moves from one network to another, in this case from a college network to a workplace network, and continues to use a social networking site for maintaining relationships, does his/her self-presentation on the site change? We hypothesize that as individuals move away from their college social networks and into the new social environment of the workplace, they will evolve their use of the Facebook website to keep in touch with college friends and maintain more frequent contact with their workplace and geographically nearby friends. To begin to answer this question, we conducted an initial survey of Facebook profile pages of our company employees and interviewed several frequent users of Facebook to gain a better understanding of how they balance maintaining relationships and impression management. The outcome of our initial inquiry is a framework for understanding the types of behaviors exhibited by these users in transition. This framework provides a starting point for considering how social network sites that support maintaining heterogeneous connections can offer a range of options for more effective impression management. We conclude with design implications for builders of social network tools that support bridging across multiple, heterogeneous social communities. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. GROUP’07, November 4–7, 2007, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-845-9/07/0011...$5.00.