Counting Carrds: Investigating Personal Disclosure and Boundary Management in Transformative Fandom

Title of the Paper

Counting Carrds: Investigating Personal Disclosure and Boundary Management in Transformative Fandom

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Privacy Theory, Fandom Culture
• Keywords: Privacy, Theory, Fandom Culture, Norms, Quantitative Methods, Twitter, Carrd.co

Research Background and Problem

• Problem or Challenge: This paper explores the privacy behaviors and norms of transformative fandom in online spaces, particularly focusing on the phenomenon of personal identity disclosure and boundary management through single-page websites like Carrd.co. The authors find complex and nuanced patterns of self-disclosure and boundary-setting behaviors between adult and minor fans, which are difficult to fully explain using existing privacy theories.
• Significance: Transformative fandom communities, primarily composed of women and queer members, provide significant insights for HCI research, especially as privacy issues become increasingly critical in contemporary online spaces.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Existing studies often focus on the privacy strategies of queer or marginalized groups, emphasizing self-censorship to mitigate risks. However, transformative fandom communities paradoxically exhibit extensive identity disclosure, highlighting the need to reinterpret collective privacy theories.

Solution

• Proposed Method or Solution: The authors collected 5,252 Carrd websites linked from Twitter fandom accounts and conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses of their content, categorizing common types of identity disclosures and boundary-setting practices.
• Innovations: Introduced a preliminary theory of "collective privacy," which conceptualizes privacy as a cyclical process of trust-building and shared norm-setting at the community level.
• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:
  1. Data Collection: Used the Twitter API to scrape the friend network of a specified fandom group, extracting Carrd website links and crawling their content.
  2. Manual Coding and Keyword Search: Conducted textual analysis of the content, manually tagging entries related to identity disclosure, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, etc.
  3. Data Classification and Model Construction: Categorized fandom Carrds into personal pages, artist pages, and organizational pages, and statistically analyzed entries in the "Do Not Interact" (DNI) and "Before You Follow" (BYF) sections.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  • 73% of Carrd websites included identity disclosures, 50% included DNI sections, and 43% included BYF sections.
  • The fandom community exhibited a high level of queer identification (79.2% related to LGBTQ+), with most disclosing age (81.5%) and pronouns (86.9%).
  • DNI sections explicitly defined interaction-blocking criteria, such as value-based exclusions (e.g., racists, homophobes) and fandom-specific controversies (e.g., content suitability for adults).
  • BYF sections emphasized social interaction etiquette, including content warnings, language usage, and rules for following and interacting.
• Comparison with Existing Solutions: Unlike traditional models that focus solely on individual privacy, the collective privacy theory offers a new perspective by observing the construction of shared community values and the dynamic maintenance of trust.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Quantitative analysis of Carrd content revealed that fandom privacy behaviors are collective and normative; community cohesion is built and maintained through members' candid disclosures and boundary-setting practices.
  • Data indicated that age, queer identity, and pronoun disclosures are critical behaviors directly related to trust-building.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Limitations: The data is limited to English-language content from Twitter fandom communities, excluding multilingual fandom groups; keyword search limitations may overlook contextual information; future data collection may be impacted by changes in Twitter's policies.
  • Future Directions: Apply the collective privacy theory to other communities or privacy contexts; study fandom behaviors as they migrate to other social platforms; design technical systems or policy frameworks that support collective privacy.

Conclusion

By analyzing Carrd websites from transformative fandom communities on Twitter, this paper proposes the collective privacy theory to address gaps in traditional privacy theories that fail to explain collective behaviors. This theory posits that communities update shared norms through personal disclosures and boundary-setting, constructing a trust environment that enables members to interact safely and express themselves. The behaviors of transformative fandom communities validate this perspective, offering a collective process framework for rethinking privacy decision-making.