From context collapse to context collusion: new approaches to social media identity management

<p dir="ltr">This is the repository concerning the interviews connected to the above study, consisting of 5 interviews carried out with users who have joined their apparently opposing identities on social media.</p><p dir="ltr">Through this paper we seek to understand how and why individuals straddling strikingly different work identities decide to make both identities public, sharing context and/or content online in an intentional process described as ‘context collusion’ by Davis and Jurgenson. We present five case studies and an autoethnographic conversation to suggest that new affordances and cultures born out of social media platforms can lead to new approaches to the study of managing identities, going beyond ideas of non-consensual or unintentional context collapse or the need to sanitise contrasting but simultaneously held identities. The aim is to elicit new ways of thinking about the ways we are increasingly challenged to manage multiple, different versions of self.</p><p dir="ltr">A prevailing view is that individuals with strikingly different professional and/or personal identities will try to keep these separate and will seek to avoid context collapse, a discussion often focussed on the need to retain a strong professional identity, untainted by life outside of the workplace, not least because <i>unintended</i> workplace-related context collapse (e.g. as a result of leaked social media posts) can limit employment and promotion opportunities, or even lead to job loss.</p><p dir="ltr">However, there are times when people <i>willingly</i> choose to share information about their distinct identities, i.e. when they deliberately engage in <i>context collusion</i>, blurring the boundaries of two radically different and somewhat challenging selves. This is the focus of this paper, where we are particularly interested in cases where individuals have two very different professional lives and make the decision to make both of these public, effectively promoting two highly different work identities across a range of contexts and platforms. In our work, we sought to understand what happens when the two professional identities share nothing in common. We sought cases that would highlight the identity management challenges involved for people who worked in two totally different, relatively incompatible jobs, but nonetheless decided to make both working lives public. In addition, we sought to include cases where one of the professional identities was highly stigmatised. As a result, the five cases we present here include three individuals who hold and promote one identity in relation to sex-related work. This is a very deliberate strategy, as we recognise that those who undertake stigmatised sex-related content creation work face additional challenges in a societal environment that still fails to consider the validity of sexual labour.</p><p dir="ltr">Through our case studies, we aim to illustrate some of the complexities of context collusion in a society that rewards digital self-promotion, and we also seek to understand more about the kinds of gains and losses that follow increased personal transparency, particularly in stigmatised contexts.</p>