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NMS0010.1177/1461444818791318new media & societyDuffy and Chan

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new media & society

“You never really know who’s

2019, Vol. 21(1) 119­–138
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444818791318
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media platforms

Brooke Erin Duffy and Ngai Keung Chan

Cornell University, USA

Abstract
Social media users are routinely counseled to cultivate their online personae with
acumen and diligence. But universal prescriptions for impression management may
prove for vexing for college students, who confront oft-conflicting codes of normative
self-presentation in digital contexts. Against this backdrop, our research sought to
examine the online self-presentation activities of emerging adults (18–24) across an
expansive social media ecology that included Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat,
and Twitter. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 28 Fcollege-aged youth, we highlight
how the imagined surveillance of various social actors steered their self-presentation
practices in patterned ways. After exploring three distinct responses to imagined
surveillance—including the use of privacy settings, self-monitoring, and pseudonymous
accounts (including “Finstas,” or fake + Instagram)—we consider the wider implications
of a cultural moment wherein users are socialized to anticipate the incessant monitoring
of social institutions: family, educators, and above all, (future) employers.

Keywords
Digital reputation, employment, Finsta, identity, self-presentation, social media,
surveillance

Corresponding author:
Brooke Erin Duffy, Department of Communication, Cornell University, 478 Mann Library Building, Ithaca,
NY 14853, USA.
Email: [email protected]
120 new media & society 21(1)

Introduction
In September 2017, The New York Times published a long-form feature that chronicled
the latest whim in corporate culture’s persistent incursion into the education sector:
teacher influencers. Reporter Natasha Singer detailed how US schoolteachers—strapped
for classroom resources amid a budget-starved state school system—are being “courted”
by tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. In exchange for gratis technolo-
gies and app support, the instructor-cum-ambassadors are expected to hype branded
products to their social media followers and, more alarmingly, to their students, who
represent potential “lifetime users of [companies’] products” (Singer, 2017). Predictably,
the article emerged as a lightning rod for debates about public education and the ethics
of technology provisions. But perhaps inadvertently, it also raised questions about the
extent to which young people are being socialized to monitor their “digital footprints.”
The article’s closing quote came from a third grader, who shared his social media takea-
way: “You don’t want to post something bad … because if you want a job, those people
are probably going to look at your social media page and they are going to decide if
they’ll let you have the job” (Singer, 2017).
The youth’s comment, we contend, is indicative of a pervasive cultural anxiety about
online surveillance and the potential implications of internet use—or maybe more aptly,
misuse. Indeed, with the astonishing uptake of social media platforms, anecdotes about
digital faux pas—a thoughtless Tweet, brash Facebook update, or indiscrete Instagram
post—circulate widely in popular culture. In a 2016 survey, more than 25% of companies
admitted to reprimanding or terminating an employee for content posted online, with
60% using social media to vet candidates (CareerBuilder, 2016; see also, Gandini and
Pais, 2018; McEwan and Flood, 2018). Such preemptive screening takes place across a
raft of social networks, with hiring managers more likely to examine an applicant’s
Instagram profile than their LinkedIn account (Vozza, 2018). College admissions com-
mittees, meanwhile, carefully scrutinize applicants and have even revoked admittance
offers (Singer, 2013). Against this backdrop, both parents (Fisk, 2014; Lincoln and
Robards, 2017) and educators (Shade and Singh, 2016; Trottier, 2012) seemingly social-
ize young people to anticipate the imagined gaze of colleges and/or future employers.
Such advice, together with a steady stream of media coverage devoted to those who
“learned social media can get you fired” (Broderick and Grinberg, 2013), help constitute
the so-called hidden curriculum of surveillance. The “hidden curriculum” concept,
explains Turow (2017), refers to “patterns that quietly encourage students to absorb and
act out their present and future social roles through the repetition of rules, stories, and
performances that reflect, sometimes inconsistently, on a range of social status levels”
(p. 15; see also, Gerbner, 1972). While Turow draws attention to the role of marketers
and retailers in establishing a hidden curriculum that facilitates data-driven consumer
profiling, our research examines how other social institutions (e.g. family, education, and
work/employment) normalize social media surveillance by teaching young people to
anticipate—hence, imagine—institutional monitoring.
Understanding how surveillance is implicated in existing power structures seems
especially crucial at the present juncture, wherein internet users continuously negotiate
identity, self-presentation, and social relationships across a sprawling social media
Duffy and Chan 121

landscape that includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and more.
Until recently, much scholarship on youth and digital media examined social networking
sites discretely; yet Zhao et al. (2016) usefully show how a social media ecology frame-
work is more apt to capture the complexities of everyday social media usage.1 On each
platform, individuals may come into contact with once-distinct social groups—family,
friends, educators, and employers—a phenomenon scholars describe as the “collapsed
contexts” of social media sites (boyd, 2008; Marwick and boyd, 2011; Hogan, 2010).
Emerging adults—including college students and recent graduates—experience these
collapses, especially of personal and professional contexts, acutely.2 How, then, does
anticipatory surveillance impact their self-presentation activities on different social
media platforms? In what ways do young people imagine the self and social surveillance
within a social media ecology? What role do institutions play as socialization agents?
And, finally, what are the sociocultural implications of these practices?
In response to these questions, our study examined how college students and recent
graduates understand and articulate self-presentation across the cross-platform media
landscape. Data come from in-depth interviews with 28 college-aged youth about their
efforts to wield control over their online image at a moment when, as one of our inform-
ants put it, “you never really know who’s looking” at your social media feeds. We explain
this phenomenon through the lens of what Lyon (2017) terms “surveillance imaginaries”
within a culture where surveillance “forms part of everyday reflections on how things are
and of the repertoire of everyday practices” (p. 825). Like other social imaginaries that
guide our understanding of the social world (Taylor, 2004), surveillance imaginaries
provide a perceptual basis for individuals’ exposure to and engagement with monitoring
activities.
Building on this framework, we introduce the concept of “imagined surveillance” to
describe how individuals conceive of the scrutiny that could take place across the social
media ecology and, consequently, may engender future risks or opportunities. Responses
to imagined surveillance—which include both disciplinary and resistance tactics—are
based upon the interplay of imagined audiences (Litt, 2012; Litt and Hargittai, 2016) and
the imagined affordances of individual platforms (Nagy and Neff, 2015). Three particu-
lar responses emerged from the interview data, including the use of privacy settings,
self-surveillance, and pseudonymous accounts, most especially “Finstas” (fake + Instagram).
We conceptualize these practices as efforts to control audiences, control content, and
control identity connections, respectively. The deployment of these practices reveals the
hidden curriculum of a surveillance culture, that is, how social media users are socialized
to accommodate acts of ubiquitous social media monitoring, particularly those that reaf-
firm unequal power relations.

Social media surveillance

The concept of surveillance traditionally refers to institutional mechanisms enacted by
governments or corporations aiming to exert control over individual citizens (Ball, 2010;
Gandy, 1989; Lyon, 2003). Yet with the proliferation of technologies that enable—and,
significantly, encourage—the broadcast of personal information to networked audiences,
scholars have reconsidered the forms of monitoring endemic to digital society (e.g., Fuchs
122 new media & society 21(1)

et al., 2013; Trottier and Lyon, 2012). Theorizations of “lateral surveillance” (Andrejevic,
2005; Humphreys, 2011), “interveillance” (Christensen and Jansson, 2015), “social sur-
veillance” (Marwick, 2012), and “participatory surveillance” (Albrechtslund, 2013) high-
light emergent forms of monitoring that may challenge or reaffirm entrenched power
hierarchies. Considerations of power are central to teasing out the relationality of privacy
and surveillance, too. Challenging the antithetical relationship between surveillance and
privacy, Marx (2016) explains that “surveillance implies an agent who accesses personal
data,” whereas privacy “involves a subject who can restrict access to personal data through
related means” (p. 23; italics original). Both concepts consider one’s efforts to control
personal data; what distinguishes them, Humphreys (2011) suggests, is that surveillance
entails “power or influence over others” (p. 576) such that an individual remains largely
unaware of the monitoring and use of such information (see also, Andrejevic, 2014).
Lyon (2017), more recently, argues social media’s prescriptions for sharing, visibility,
and exposure impel us further into a “surveillance culture” wherein, “surveillance is
becoming part of a whole way of life” (p. 825). Marking a departure from earlier notions
of a “surveillance state” or “surveillance society,” Lyon (2017) argues that individuals
play an active role in a surveillance culture through their efforts to regulate their own
monitoring and that of others (p. 824). Notions of “surveillance imaginaries” and “sur-
veillance practices” are constitutive of this culture; the former refers to ways of thinking
about what surveillance is and how people should expect and engage in surveillance,
whereas the latter include activities “that relate to being surveilled (responsive) and also
modes of engagement with surveillance” (p. 830).
Particularly relevant to this study are surveillance imaginaries that appeal to an imag-
ined audience—the conception of “the people with whom we are communicating”—on
social media (Litt, 2012: 331). However, as noted earlier, social media is routinely a site
of collapsed contexts, where various social groups are privy to the same digital persona.
With “individual, institutional, market and investigative scrutiny all rely[ing] on the
same interface,” Trottier (2012) explains, “personal information that has been uploaded
for any particular purpose will potentially be used for several kinds of surveillance” (p.
157). And, indeed, reports of employers screening employees’ or job candidates’ per-
sonal social media accounts are rife (Gandini and Pais, 2018; McEwan and Flood, 2018).
As such, an evaluation of what Hedenus and Backman (2017) term “online employabil-
ity” becomes part of the recruitment process: employers expect job seekers “to sanitize,
keep track of, and explain their data double” (p. 651). Increasingly, employability direc-
tives are hitched to discourses of reputation-management and the more buzzy concept of
personal branding.

The promises and perils of self-branding for emerging

adults
Management consultants and business pundits have long offered counsel on the strategic
presentation of the self. Yet personal branding discourses have seen an astonishing uptick
in the social media age as workers of all stripes are prodded to stage an ever-employable
front. Researchers and cultural theorists attribute the current personal branding mania to
a constellation of social and economic forces, including the cult of personality structured
Duffy and Chan 123

into Silicon Valley social networks (Marwick, 2013); the steady incursion of market log-
ics into various realms of social life (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Hearn, 2010); constructions of
online reputation management circulated by the commercial privacy industry (Draper,
2019); and the precarity of the work economy that incites individuals to internalize the
demands of self-enterprise (Duffy, 2017; Gandini, 2016; Neff, 2012; Scolere et al., 2018;
Vallas and Christin, 2018).
The system of higher education in the United States and in the United Kingdom has
ostensibly embraced the self-marketing mandate, with many universities offering courses
or curricula on personal branding and entrepreneurship (Gershon, 2017). As such, teen-
agers and young adults are socialized to leverage social media to craft themselves into
marketable self-commodities and to “ensure their digital footprint is positive and consist-
ent” (Cohen, 2015: para. 4). During career talks, for instance, college students are coun-
seled to “clean up” their Facebook profiles before applying for jobs—a trend which
Lincoln and Robards (2017) suggest is part of a larger, iterative process of editing the
social media self (p. 524).
While discourses of employability highlight the profound stakes of one’s social media
activity, the realities of maintaining an ideal self-brand can be quite confounding, par-
ticularly given the resonant social media ideal of “consistency” (Gershon, 2017;
Marwick, 2013; Scolere et al., 2018). Pinpointing the larger contradiction underpinning
personal branding directives and contemporary understandings of identity performance,
Gershon (2017) probes, “How can someone always be willing and able to transform and
yet remain a cohesive self?” (p. 35). On one hand, she explains, individuals are expected
to project a “context-free” brand that is flexible enough to withstand the vagaries of the
contingent employment market. On the other, people always perform differently depend-
ing upon the specific context.
Social media scholars have thus, in recent years, examined how people maintain vari-
ous socially mediated “selves” to enact discrete elements of their identity on different
platforms. Challenging Mark Zuckerberg’s (in)famous contention that people have one
identity online, van Dijck (2013) argues that “keeping up multiple personas across plat-
forms may be a powerful strategy for users to ‘perform’ their identity” (p. 211; see also,
boyd, 2014; Duffy, 2017). Scolere et al. (2018), meanwhile, reveal how digital creative
workers vary their self-presentation across social networking sites in patterned ways as a
part of “platform-specific self-branding” practices. Similarly, young people report fram-
ing their LinkedIn and Facebook interactions in widely distinct ways based upon consid-
erations of employability (Gershon, 2017).
The shrewd control of one’s self-presentation is by no means a novel concept, espe-
cially among teenagers, and many offline practices of impression-management translate
well into digital contexts (Lincoln and Robards, 2016; Livingstone, 2008). Countering the
common refrain that “teenagers don’t care about privacy” (p. 1052), Marwick and boyd
(2014) show how teenagers conceptualize privacy in a way that foregrounds their own
control within a “constellation of audience dynamics, social norms, and technical func-
tionality” (p. 1063). Later, as teens enter the stage of adulthood, they confront a new set
of realities related to privacy and surveillance of (future) employers. Our particular focus
on surveillance indicates an overarching concern with institutional power asymmetries
within what is allegedly a “critical” moment of identity transition (Lincoln and Robards,
124 new media & society 21(1)

2017). Not only is this group uniquely positioned between various social institutions—
including family, education, and employment—but their sustained participation across an
ever-changing social media ecology is telling of how individuals reflect on changes in
self-awareness (Lincoln and Robards, 2017) and social relationships (Robards and
Lincoln, 2016) over a period of time.3 Therefore, an exploration of young people’s sur-
veillance imaginaries can help us to understand how individuals are socialized by a hid-
den curriculum of surveillance.

Method
This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 28 college students and recent gradu-
ates. Participants were initially recruited through campus fliers and email listserves
soliciting interviewees for a study of social media self-presentation; a snowball sample
was used to recruit participants from other universities to extend our categories using
theoretical sampling. Our interview participants represented four universities on the US
east coast; their completion levels (freshman through postgraduate) and courses of study
included biology, communication, education, engineering, and management, among oth-
ers.4 Women were greatly overrepresented in our sample (n = 25), a trend that may reflect
larger social media usage disparities (Smith and Anderson, 2018) as well as gender dif-
ferences in self-presentation (Herring and Kapidzic, 2015). It is noteworthy that early
research on social networking sites revealed that young women are more concerned
about employers screening Facebook data (Peluchette and Karl, 2008)—a trend that
indexes larger social biases in recruitment and hiring. Also importantly, the fact that
many of our interviewees were enrolled in universities is telling of their class standing
and relative privilege.
The majority of the interviews were conducted in person, and at the completion of a
30–35 minute (average) interview, participants were compensated through a university-
credit or cash incentive. The interviews followed a semi-structured protocol, and discus-
sion questions/topics included: initial use and changing experiences with various
platforms, the size and scope of various networks (i.e. “audiences”), the types of content
shared/avoided, the use of privacy settings, reflections on personal branding, socializa-
tion into social media culture, among other topics. Interviews were transcribed by a
professional service, and the researchers used an inductive approach to establish coding
categories. We followed a grounded theory approach, which involves the subjectification
of “inductive data to rigorous comparative analysis that successively moves from study-
ing concrete realities to rendering a conceptual understanding from these data” (Charmaz
and Belgrave, 2012: 347). Moreover, the processes of data collection and analysis were
iterative; for instance, when we learned about “Finstas,” we began to solicit additional
interview participants who had accounts.

Imagined surveillance on social media

During their expositions, interviewees made it clear that surveillance imaginaries and
practices structured their social media activities in profound and complex ways.
Mandy, for instance, noted, “I know it’s on social media, so once it’s online, it’s there
Duffy and Chan 125

forever.” Discussing how this mentality impacts her image-sharing behaviors, she
offered, “I definitely want to make sure it’s appropriate cause [sic] I know a lot of
people could potentially see it even if my network isn’t that big.” Like many of our
participants, Mandy seemed to express concern with how her social media activities
could potentially impact the future. Other young people were especially reflective
about the difficulties imposed by the collapsed contexts of social media (boyd, 2008;
Hogan, 2010). When asked about how he interacts with people on different platforms,
Daniel shared:

I have never interacted with [my Instagram followers] on LinkedIn and really hope I never do.
I think there’s something very inherent in something being a professional medium and then
something that’s so intensely personal where, of course, I’ll divulge more of myself in a
personal setting than I would in a professional one because I have a demeanor that I put on in
that professional sphere.

Sadie, meanwhile, expressed her concern that colleagues and bosses might screen her
Facebook activities; as she put it, “you never really know who’s looking at your
Facebook.” She added:

You hear all these horror stories of—whether it’s a student applying to college or a student
applying to a job—and their employer or admissions office going through their Facebook and
seeing all these pictures and deciding not to give them the position, or not to give them a space
at the school. I never really want to jeopardize my future, by making myself vulnerable to that.

In this vein, self-surveillance—including the avoidance of certain types of content—

becomes a practice aimed at maintaining employability.
To anticipate and potentially deflect the negative consequences of imagined surveil-
lance, our interviewees instituted a variety of social and technical practices, including:

1. Privacy settings, or an attempt to manage the audience;

2. Self-surveillance and platform-specific presentations, or an attempt to manage
content;
3. The use of pseudonyms and multiple aliases, or an attempt to control the connec-
tion to one’s identity.

Before discussing these practices within the framework of imagined surveillance, it

seems important to address how young people were socialized into a culture of ubiqui-
tous monitoring. Several interviewees explained the role of family in teaching them
norms of appropriate digital media usage. Nicole recalled:

When I came to college, I got the talk from my parents, ‘Don’t post any pictures of you when
you’re visibly intoxicated or … holding alcohol … [Now] I’m [Facebook] friends with my dad,
and occasionally I’ll get a text being like, “You should take that picture down,” He’s always like
“Oh, jobs this, jobs that …”
126 new media & society 21(1)

Nicole thus attributed her father’s directives to expectations that employers are likely to
screen young people’s activity; in response, she had changed the privacy settings and
created a pseudonym—practices we discuss below.
Haley, meanwhile, explained the guidance she received from her mother, including
avoiding being “tagged in pictures when there’s beer in the background.” She indicated
surprise that her peers failed to follow similar instructions. She reasoned, “I have a lot of
friends that will post pictures of them drinking on their public Facebook … I would have
thought that more people would have been like me, where their parents have always told
them …” Haley’s reflection suggests that being monitored is understood as a contempo-
rary social norm; that is, she expects her peers to have been counseled to self-regulate.
Tyler, too, noted that his parents taught him about appropriate social media use; yet he
seemed to internalize this culture of careful impression management as he grew older:
“Back in the day, my parents had my Facebook account password and everything and
monitor[ed] it.” “Now,” he contrasted, “it’s kind of just my judgment.” He offered a
hypothetical example of untagging a photo which revealed him holding a beer can, and
added, “My mom doesn’t need to tell me that for me to feel that way.” Of course, other
interviewees feared that their parents would be the ones enacting surveillance—a salient
factor in the use of privacy settings.
Young people also learn about social media “best practices” from their educators—
high-school teachers and, later, college professors. Echoing Lincoln and Robards’s
(2017) observations about advice on social media self-editing presented at career talks,
our interviewees were taught to make conscious efforts to manage their online personae.
Mandy, for instance, attributed her own careful self-policing behaviors to her university
curricula: “I’ve taken a lot of classes that talk about how … you can really find every-
thing on the internet nowadays. So these things kind of have made me more attuned to
privacy issues.” While Mandy’s classes were part of her communication major, Larissa
and Kierstyn learned about the importance of impression-management through their
education degrees. Kierstyn told us, “[I]n high school, they always scare you like, ‘Oh,
they’re going to find your social media and judge you for stuff.” Larissa, similarly, noted
“We’re constantly reminded in education: Make sure your social media is private, make
sure you change [your] names.” She offered a telling anecdote that occurred while she
was in high school:

“We had a … permanent substitute teacher, and she was a lot younger, and somebody found her
Vine or something, and it had some videos that students shouldn’t be seeing, and she ended up
getting fired.”

Such a remarkable example becomes a part of the surveillance imaginary in highlighting

the potentially devastating consequences of social media misuse.
Of course, young people don’t always follow the norms taught by their parents and
educators. Sabrina, for instance, noted, “My parents always said that you should keep
your personal life ‘personal’ and your business friends and co-workers separate, but I
have co-workers on Facebook, as well as previous bosses … because I never had any-
thing that I felt like I needed to hide.” This example suggests that parents and educators
had a more unified imagination of “appropriate” social media use. The young adults in
Duffy and Chan 127

our sample, by contrast, indicated that their online practices continued to take shape amid
wider transformations in the social media ecology. Some migrated to and from different
platforms; a common tendency was swapping Twitter and Facebook for the more vogu-
ish Instagram and Snapchat. Others, meanwhile, highlighted their own maturity; as
Larissa put it, “I feel like I have evolved in my social media presence as I’ve grown up.”
Such statements reaffirm Lincoln and Robards’s (2016) findings about young people
who seemingly “renovate” conventions of the digital space, or even moved away from
them, when they no longer square with their identities (pp. 939–941). The creation of a
Finsta—fake Instagram account—exemplifies this type of boundary work. While our
interviewees were socialized to present a highly curated self on Instagram and other
social media platforms, Finstas emerged as a social space where they could attempt to
evade the concerns about surveillance and possible disciplinary outcomes.

Privacy settings: managing who sees

Those in our sample tended to frame privacy settings, along with the wider technological
affordances of individual platforms, as resources to control social media audiences. That
is, informants utilized privacy features based upon their considerations of—and concerns
with—various social actors who they feared would monitor their social media activity.
Several of our interviewees admitted to using customized privacy settings to conceal
status updates from parents and other family members. While Daniel blocked his mom
from seeing his Snapchat stories, Lyndsey explained that all of her accounts were set to
private, a decision she attributed “definitely [to] jobs, because I’m an education major.”
Kylee, similarly, relayed, “I used to have it [Instagram] on public, but just especially
when you’re applying to jobs, it’s just not worth it.” Kylee’s reference to a publicly vis-
ible account as “not worth it” calls attention to the (imagined) implications of social
media activity and, in particular, the concern that content will be discovered by the wrong
audience (“employers”).
Other interviewees expressed uncertainty about the visibility of their profiles, despite
their reliance on these settings for audience management. Olivia was forthcoming about
her decision to use privacy settings in anticipation of employer surveillance. She rea-
soned, “I’m really careful with privacy controls and stuff, just because I know how much
employers are on the internet… My Instagram is private. Facebook, I think you can only
see my profile picture and my cover photo.” Hanna, similarly, described her use of “lim-
ited … privacy settings so that you can’t search me.” She then clarified, “If we have
mutual friends, I think you can actually search me.” Note, here, the common refrain of “I
think,” which indicates a level of vagueness with technical controls. Larissa’s exposition
of privacy settings also revealed some inconsistencies, particularly regarding her under-
standing of the privacy features of Facebook: “I always feel like I don’t have the privacy
settings [on Facebook] on high enough, but it’s not public. I don’t know, [it’s] whatever
the default is.” For these young people, then, it was somewhat unclear what information
remained visible and invisible to their imagined audience across the social media land-
scape. Echoing Andrejevic’s (2014) observation of a “big data divide,” there is a disso-
nance between the desire to manage the social media audience and the lack of knowledge
about the publicness of personal information.
128 new media & society 21(1)

Other interviewees, by contrast, were quite intentional in their use of social networking
sites’ privacy settings for audience management. Sadie recalled how during high school, she
chose to put “family, distant family and my parents on limited profile [on Facebook], so they
couldn’t see the racy pictures that I was posting”; she maintained these settings despite being
much more “mature” and selective with her posts. By contrast, she understood the Instagram
privacy settings as a way to engage in social surveillance (Marwick, 2012) of her account
followers. She explained, “I do go off private sometimes, but I usually always switch back
[to public], and so I can see really everyone that’s following me.” The affordances of
Instagram’s privacy settings thus enabled her to keep track of those inside her social media
network, tallying up users who sought access to her feed. In a similar vein, Tyler attributed
his vacillation between public and private settings on Instagram to his own impulses for
social monitoring: “As superficial as it sounds, [making my profile public] also gives me
more followers. I think if you’re public … people see your pictures and stuff.” Although
Sadie and Tyler articulated Instagram privacy differently, both seemed carefully attuned to
the social costs and rewards of social media surveillance.
To be sure, a small subset of our interviewees seemed less concerned with particular
audiences—parents, employers, peers—and more anxious about the circulation of their
personal information in public spaces. As Kierstyn told us, “It would creep me out a little
bit if someone knew intimate details of my life.” Naomi seemed to echo this, stating, “If
someone searched me and they didn’t know who I was, I don’t want them to see my life.
You know?” It was more common, however, for social media users’ self-presentation
activities to be guided by a concern for the surveillance of an (imagined) audience.

Self-surveillance and platform specificity: managing what they see

At the same time that young people rely upon platform settings to negotiate their pres-
ence among various audiences, many also engaged in self-surveillance, which entails a
heightened “attention to their actions and thoughts when constituting themselves as sub-
jects of their conduct” (Vaz and Bruno, 2003: 273; see also, Humphreys, 2011).
Accordingly, our informants monitored their social media activities with vigilance as
they sought to conceal and reveal different types of content across a vast online ecology.
Considerations of the audience figured prominently here, too, but interviewees fore-
grounded what they did and did not want these networked groups to see. Daniel reflected
of his Instagram:
I have to make [an account] that’s acceptable enough for my family to see and then also for my
friends to find interesting. There are things that could fall into one of those groups but not both.
Those are things that I’ll probably try to avoid.

To make sense of social media self-surveillance, it is vital to consider people’s desig-

nations of what Daniel described as “acceptable,” or what others delineated as “appropri-
ate” versus “inappropriate” content. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of our interviewees
considered photos of drinking, partying, or vulgar language “inappropriate.” Lyndsey,
who described herself as “very conscious of what I post,” asserted she did not post any-
thing “bad” such as “making fun of people” or “embarrassing pictures.” Meredith, cor-
respondingly, noted, “I don’t post anything super risqué … Drugs and alcohol, I try to
Duffy and Chan 129

keep off of it. I don’t try and put any really questionable comments.” Kierstyn, by con-
trast, believed appropriateness with regard to the (future) workforce was context-spe-
cific, largely dependent on the industry and workplace composition. She reasoned, “I’m
looking mostly in tech and that kind of stuff for potential fields of employment, so …
going into a field like that, being yourself on social media is kind of celebrated more …
versus going into something like finance.” She added, “If I’m working with other people
who are in college, millennials, they’re kind of used to having their lives on social
media.” Eliana, similarly, drew attention to “people who are just not used to being
authentic on social media or active.” She explained, “If those are your co-workers than
you might have to tone it down or not friend them.” Meanwhile, our interviewees actively
monitored others’ social networks since unknown disclosures may jeopardize young
peoples’ capacity to curate a cohesive and desirable digital persona. Haley, for instance,
shared, “I’ve been tagged in a few pictures, and I’ll either remove the tag or … I’ll text
the person who posted it and be like “Can you please untag me? I haven’t asked people
to delete the pictures, but I don’t want to be tagged in it.” Her comment indicates users’
awareness that private information about them circulates in public spaces through others’
online activities (Humphreys, 2017). Such self-monitoring practices, more broadly, have
significant implications for young people’s presentation of self. Highlighting the vexing
nature of identity performance, Larissa noted, “I try to stay … somewhat true to myself.
[But] I feel like there’s no way to actually be true to yourself because you’re filtering so
much of it.”
Not only did young people carefully attend to the information they didn’t want made
public, they also acknowledged the presentation of self they did aim to project; this
binary maps loosely onto the distinction between impressions given off and given
(Goffman, 1959). Events, “pictures of friends,” “scenery,” “baking stuff,” and “stuff
about clubs and organizations on campus” were among the types of content our inter-
viewees shared with intent, although variations existed across platforms (Facebook vs
Instagram, for instance). And, indeed, our interviewees’ practices of self-surveillance
varied across different social networking sites, based upon platform-specific modes of
self-presentation (boyd, 2014; Scolere et al., 2018). As Hanna reflected poignantly, “I
think my identity on each social media site is varied. Together you would get a pretty
good image of me, but if you were to see one, there’s not a lot of cohesion between what
I’m presenting on Instagram versus what I’m presenting on Facebook.” Christina’s
observation that “there’s definitely a unique personality or characteristic of each plat-
form” also exemplifies platform-specific orientations to the social media ecology.
Specifically, she tended to post “serious” content on Facebook and share “crazy snaps”
on Snapchat, in part because the imagined audiences on Snapchat are usually close
friends, whereas the audience on Facebook is more motley.
In addition, while Kylee noted that her social media accounts are “to an extent … all
me,” she explained how she presented different types of content based upon perceived
intimacy with her audiences:

Snapchat is very much like myself, more like personal, because it’s my really close friends,
whereas Instagram, I have a lot of more people I don’t know closely, and Facebook, I just don’t
post as much … I try to update my family members and parents … [On Instagram], I kind of
try and keep it very light, and I also try not to post a lot of political stuff …
130 new media & society 21(1)

Her evasion of “political stuff” in favor of “very light” content reveals how platform-
specific self-presentation represents a form of self-censorship. Zhu, similarly, described
how Facebook has a “wider audience” and is “definitely more professional.” She contin-
ued, “I would only post big news in my life [such as], ‘Oh, I got a job,’ or ‘I’m moving
here.’” She strayed from content that was “more for her generation” out of a concern that
“an adult might think it’s rude or something.” Sadie was particularly self-reflective of
how the potential audience of each site shapes self-presentation—and consequently self-
surveillance—activities. The types of content she shares, she offered, “really just depends
on who my audiences are on each platform.” She offered an example:

If there’s a picture of me drinking or partying or something like that, that I wouldn’t want my
extended family [or an] employer to see, I’m probably not going to post that on Facebook, but
I might post it on Instagram, ‘cause I know it’s just more people my age and I really look at
every single person who requests to follow me. And [I decide], “Am I going to want them to
see the types of photos?”

Sadie’s comment reveals how “inappropriate” content on a particular site might become
“appropriate” on another platform, affirming that each site has its unique affordances and
social norms (Zhao et al., 2016; Scolere et al., 2018).

Pseudonyms and multiple aliases: managing the connection to one’s

identity
The concealment of one’s “real” identity—such as through a fictitious moniker or multi-
ple aliases on a single platform—emerged as another tactic of surveillance evasion. That
is, users attempted to keep their digital personae “unlinkable” to other identity expres-
sions through principles of fakery reminiscent of early web culture (boyd, 2014; Cirucci,
2015; Raynes-Goldie, 2010). One of the most frequently mentioned identity conceal-
ment tactics was the use of a pseudonym representing some variation of one’s name
(Lincoln and Robards, 2017). Nicole, for instance, recalled the decision to change her
social media accounts to her first and middle name: “When [college juniors] start looking
for jobs or internships that could turn into jobs, people [opted to] do it as a precaution.”
She added that her dad frequently lectured her about “how employers can find you, and
I was just like, I’m just going to change it [from my first and last name].” She later noted,
“It’s harder for them to find you if [you swap your last name for] your middle name. At
least we all assume that.”
Other interviewees similarly articulated such modes of identity camouflage as a way
to resist the surveillance of employers and college admissions committees. Notably, sev-
eral students discussed how their initiation to name-changing strategies emerged in high
school, where anecdotes of Internet-screening college admissions committees were rife.
Hanna recalled how some of her peers created a second, public-facing Facebook account
to stage a college-ready front: “They had their fake Facebook profiles and their regular
Facebook profiles, and one of them was the one that they thought colleges were going to
Duffy and Chan 131

look at, so [their posts were] like, “Heading off to my SAT tutors now [in order to project
a sense of studiousness].”
Even more common among those in our sample was the creation of a second Instagram
account, known as a “Finsta”—a portmanteau of “fake” and “Insta” where users share
more personal content with a select group of friends. Crucially, the “fake” designation
refers to the pseudonymous nature of the doppelgänger account handle, rather than to
users’ calculated attempts at duplicity. Some young people, as we discuss below, found
Finstas as a way to project a more “realistic” version of their daily lives—one that sub-
verted the cultural conventions of social media performativity with mocking irreverence.
According to our interviewees, young people began creating alternative accounts on
Instagram years ago, but the Finsta trend had seen a marked spike in the year preceding
our interviews. In fact, almost half (13 of 28) of our interviewees maintained both Rinsta
(real + Instagram) and Finsta accounts, and all but one followed their friends’ Finstas.
Finstas are, according to our interviewees, marked by their smaller followings, ironic
tone, and decidedly less polished aesthetic.
The contrast with Instagram—with its culture of airbrushed perfection and aspira-
tional lifestyle presentation—was central to understanding how young people presented
themselves on their Finstas. As Daniel offered:

I think there are such intense constraints levied on people on Instagram and ostensibly also on
Facebook … Then you have the idea of this much edgier, perhaps less palatable account that
you can create to maybe put parts of your real, stranger self also into the abyss of the internet
without that same pressure to get judged and be well-received.

Or, as Madeline explained, Instagram is a place to post “a pretty nice, edited, high-
quality picture with some witty caption I put way too much time into thinking of.” She
juxtaposed this with Finsta, where she will share “a really ugly selfie I snapped of myself
half-way through walking [and] an entire paragraph of every single thing that happened
to me that day.” Haley, similarly, contrasted the images of cityscapes and formal events
she shared on her Instagram with her Finsta, where, “if something funny happens to me
I’ll post a post about it and tell a story or complain about my life or stuff.”
Accordingly, interviewees mentioned they could share “funny” or even “sarcastic”
content on Finsta, though these posts were often considered “inappropriate” for public
consumption. To this end, users drew upon the framework of “appropriateness” to delin-
eate the types of content best suited for these accounts. Thus, while Tyler was careful to
point out that he doesn’t “post anything bad,” he noted that his Finsta will occasionally
include vulgar language. He added, “I would not want someone to [let that] get that back
to my mom.” As such, his Finsta was limited to “a select group of people.” Lyndsay,
similarly described her Finsta audience as “very selective,” while Alyssa explained that
she had “about like 20 Finsta followers … [compared to] over 1,000 regular Instagram
followers.” Decisions about with whom to share one’s Finsta account were based upon
mutual understandings of trust and closeness. Sadie explained the importance of the
former in deciding who has access to her account:
132 new media & society 21(1)

[It’s a] very intentional audience behind my Finstagram, and I have this trust in everyone that
follows it, that no one’s going to share the pictures, and they’re not going to circulate. I’ve tried
to reduce the number of followers to people I really think are going to be respectful of whatever
sort of privacy [setting].

Comments like this reaffirm Marwick and boyd’s (2014) findings about teenager’s pri-
vacy disclosures, namely, that individuals only reveal personal information when they
feel confident that it won’t negatively impact them (p. 1061). But there’s a tradeoff: when
young people decide to share personal information to establish intimacy, it also makes
them vulnerable to the various risks associated with information disclosure (Bazarova,
2012). The culture of omnipresent social surveillance further intensifies the vulnerability
of young people, as exemplified by Kylee’s cynical considerations of the audience: “Oh,
wait. Do I trust all the people I let follow my Finsta?” Tellingly, she added, “Not that I
post anything super scandalous or bad because I realize that if I post something on the
internet it could pop up somewhere that I wouldn’t want it to.” Inherent in Kylee’s com-
ment is a fear of being monitored and the associated unknown consequences.

Conclusion
Paralleling the profound growth of our social media culture and economy are persis-
tent warnings about institutional and social surveillance; such foreboding is captured
by the dictum, “you never know who’s looking” at your social media profile(s). Our
research indicates that young people are socialized to anticipate digital surveillance
from various social institutions—family, educators, and above all, employers. The
advice they furnish—packaged in wider directives of “appropriate behavior” or “pro-
fessionalism,” and hence overwhelmingly oriented toward employability—becomes
part of a hidden curriculum of ubiquitous monitoring (Edwards, 2015; Turow, 2017).
By teaching young adults—who represent the first generation to experience the career-
related opportunities and, crucially, challenges of online self-presentation—to imagine
such surveillance, these activities get normalized as a part of everyday digital life.
Young people, significantly, have learned to vary their surveillance imaginaries and
self-presentation across social media platforms to shape and rearticulate the digital
spaces they encounter (boyd, 2014; Lincoln and Robards, 2016; Livingstone, 2008).
Indeed, platform-specific affordances of (in)visibility and exposure configure social
media within a larger constellation of “surveillance technologies” (Gandini and Pais,
2018).
The ever-looming threat of imagined surveillance has instigated a variety of preemp-
tive social media practices—from the use of privacy settings to judicious self-monitoring
to conscious efforts to sever the ties between one’s “real” identity and their digital per-
sona. These activities seem to exist on a continuum from technological affordances (e.g.
privacy settings) to social practices (deleting/avoiding material to enact self-surveil-
lance)—neither of which can be understood discretely. Yet, importantly, they continue to
evolve and take shape against a rapidly evolving social media landscape, wherein indi-
vidual platforms are framed as a way to project distinctive elements of one’s identity. In
Duffy and Chan 133

other words, the use of different platforms helped users shore up the boundaries that are
inevitably eroded within the collapsed contexts of social media (Scolere et al., 2018).
While our study showed how young people circumvent persistent monitoring, the
issue of resistance is more complex. Resistance is an intentional practice that expresses
opposition to, or undermines, power differentials (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004). Yet,
much like privacy controls, deliberate acts of self-surveillance—censoring photos with
alcohol or hemming in expressions of perilousness—are largely compliant with the
imagined surveilled gazes, especially of future employers. Owing to a wider surveillance
culture (Lyon, 2017), individuals don’t just learn about the “dynamics of surveillance,”
but also about “the duties of surveillance” (p. 830; italics original). Opting out—or lack-
ing a robust social media presence—is, in many fields, not an option. To this end, we
contend that the imagined surveillance occurring on social media cannot be understood
apart from other modes of corporate surveillance propelling the digital economy. After
all, a hidden curriculum that prods individuals to expect scrutinization of their personal
social media profiles is the same one that renders professional surveillance permissible.
Workplace surveillance, of course, comes in various incarnations—spyware on comput-
ers, programs that log the time spent on work (and non-work) tasks, and even biometric
devices that calibrate the performance of employees (Ball, 2010; Levy, 2015; Moore,
2018; Neff and Nafus, 2016). Employers, perhaps predictably, frame such activities as a
boon to their workers with upbeat assurances of safety, responsiveness, or productivity.
But in workplace surveillance—much like social media—the boundaries between the
personal and the professional get blurred in alarming ways. Such was the case in early
2018, when American cheerleader Bailey Davis was fired after uploading a photograph
of herself in a one-piece bodysuit—on her personal Instagram account. Subsequently,
Davis filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, noting
the staggeringly different rules about social media for (male) players and (female) cheer-
leaders (Belson, 2018).
Cases such as this underscore the importance of taking seriously the politics of digital
monitoring, including the question of “who” gets surveilled—both inside and outside of
the workplace. Summarizing survey findings about a marked political divide with respect
to views on surveillance, Turow et al. (2018) note:

Those who express warm emotions toward surveillance or don’t see that their sense of security
is threatened in the face of these practices … may not change their feelings as forms of
surveillance expand to disproportionally impact other population segments (for example, those
based on age, gender, religion, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identification, and the
intersections among these categories). (p. 26, see also, Ball, 2010; Gilliom, 2001)

Put simply, acts of surveillance are not evenly deployed. The concept of surveillance
culture (Lyon, 2017) may open up some new directions for thinking about the uneven-
ness of surveillance and its role in exacerbating social hierarchies. For example, who is
more vulnerable to the disciplinary outcomes of imagined surveillance? What are the
ethical implications of the unequal distribution of surveillance imaginaries/practices?
In the end, the contemporary hidden curriculum of surveillance goes far beyond pre-
scriptions for how much or what kinds of information we can control; it also instructs us
134 new media & society 21(1)

how we should organize our digital traces to conform to the (commercial) logics of sur-
veillance/self-branding. Across an expansive social media ecology, we are prodded to
carefully craft and maintain a self for public consumption—a production that entails
incessant invisible labor: cultivating social relationships as “followers,” “friends,” and
“connections,” producing and sharing online content, and curating a consistent digital
persona that will withstand public scrutiny. Such online self-branding practices are
common among workers of all stripes—especially cultural or knowledge workers (e.g.
Cohen, 2015; Duffy, 2017; Gandini, 2016; Hearn, 2008); however, today’s students and
newly minted graduates are increasingly directed to present themselves through the lan-
guage and form of brands. The desire to present oneself as “professional” is perhaps a
reality of a hypercompetitive job market where employers caution that we’re only as
good as our last tweet. But we must consider the stakes of a society wherein parents,
educators, and young people themselves become socialization agents who normalize
unbounded surveillance. Bringing the hidden curriculum of surveillance to the fore-
ground helps us to question the implications of a digital media environment where young
people are expected to be always on and eminently employable.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Noteworthy exceptions include Livingstone’s (2008) analysis of teenage self-presentation
across MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and Friendster and Marwick and boyd’s (2014) article on
networked privacy.
2. See Arnett (2004) for a discussion of “emergent adulthood” as a distinct phase of life.
3. This is not to suggest they are necessarily so-called “digital natives” or a homogeneous
group of users, but to highlight how they are socialized into various kinds of social media
surveillance.
4. The majority was from the authors’ home institution.

ORCID iDs
Brooke Erin Duffy https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6314-8027
Ngai Keung Chan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5848-3098

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Author biographies
Brooke Erin Duffy (PhD) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell
University. Her research interests include digital and social media industries; cultural and creative
labor; and gender and technology. Her most recent book is (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You
Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (2017).
Ngai Keung Chan is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. His
research interests surround the intersection of work and technology.