Online Self Disclosure

1. Introduction

Communication and self-disclosure are the most important parts of any relationship whether friends or close. A tie is created as we continue to share personal experiences, thoughts with other people. These activities will make the bond getting stronger or sometimes it’s fulfilling the intimacy needs. (Athena Cetedral, 2015)

According to Pearson (2010), self-disclosure is happen when individuals sharing information with others that they would not normally know or discover. It also might involves threat and exposure when someone sharing their information. It can also be described as information that purposely disclosure to others (A Primer on Communication Studies vol. 10, n.d).  For example, someone wear shirt with UiTM’s logo purposely, to reveal her belonging to the University. There are many types of information we can disclose, but we have to determine whether or not we will proceed with disclosure by considering the situation and the potential risks of the exposure. There are numerous decisions that go into the process of self-disclosure, then we must decide when, where, and how to disclose.  Some people tend to disclose themselves in order to getting self-affiliation and fulfill the needs of intimacy.

How they disclose? According to Athena Cetedral (2015), people start to disclose when one discloses personal information in a conversation and the other is likely to respond. We are attracted to them and a sense of trust grows when individuals disclose information about themselves to us. As result, consciously and sometimes, unconsciously, we tend to respond by disclosing personal information to that person. Hence, new relationship likely to start as result from the conversations if the one we talking to is a stranger we just made.

1.1. Problem Statement

Communication is the crucial part in maintaining relationship and rapport with others, everyone have the desire to get close to one another as to fulfill the need of self-intimacy.  Face to face communication is the most effective ways to interact with people and friends that close to one’s self.  However, since the constraints of miles and distances between one another, which are the barriers for certain affected people.  Some of people tend to make new friends on the internet; some prefer to maintain the existing relationship via social media such as, Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and etc. These social media platform enable people to stay connected, and even also allow for new relationship to occur.

In order to meets up with the needs of intimacy with current and new people via online media, we need to disclose our self to others so that they know about our existence, hence the rapport between one another even strangers in the friend list will enriches.

According to Wortham (2010), for example, officials from Facebook, one of the most popular social networking websites, say that privacy issues are complex and somewhat confusing to users.  He added Facebook has implemented changes that the news media has reported as threatening to user privacy (Wortham 2010). The problem of excessive self-disclosure nowadays brings bad impact toward certain users. This research need to be conduct to discover on criteria that influence people self-disclose especially in online media, and does it affect user’s privacy.  

 1.2. Research Questions

1. Do personality traits have relationship with self-disclosure?
2. Do expectations have connection with self-disclosure?
3. Does trust building have significant value with self-disclosure?

1.3. Research Objectives

1. To identify the relationship between personality traits and self-disclosure
2. To recognize the relationship between expectations and self-disclosure
3. To classify the relationship between trust and self-disclosure

1.4. Significance of the study

This research will focus on the criteria such as personality traits, trust and expectations on the individual self-disclosure online. It explores the factors that contribute to people self-disclosure.  This study will help the readers to understand people intentions to disclose their self in online media and the drive that push them to do so.

1.5. Scope of the study

The conclusion of the research is based on the responses given by the social media users in higher learning institutions.  This research will be useful to readers in order to understand the factors that contributing in online self-discloser because sometimes, people unconsciously excessive expose their self in social media in order to fulfill the needs of affections.

1.6. Limitations of the study

The limitations that might occur during the research study, is the study time to understand the concept and referring past research itself because of the time constraints.  Additional limitation is research will be conducted only in higher learning institutions so it does not represent the whole online media users. Lastly, some of the respondent might not transparent enough in answering the questionnaires given due to uncertainty.

2. Literature review

2.1. Self-disclosure and the internet

Internet based behavior can be characterized as containing high level of self-disclosure.  Nowadays, people prefer to disclose themselves online because of time constraints and some of them might have problem in making face to face relationship.  In addition, online self-disclose allow long distance friends to get new updates from the user & keep in touch regularly in virtual way.  Rheingold (1993) claims that new intimacy relationship usually occur through internet online platform because of the unlimited access and exposure they received. Secondly, one scholar have argues that people are more disclose to computer that recently seems to be happening on the internet (Wallace, 1999).

2.2. Personal information disclosure

According to Australian Government Webpage (n.d), any information or combination of information that enables person to be recognized is personal information. Personal informations includes following criteria such as full name, address, phone numbers, personal photos, and what people might share on their online media platform.  People tend to reveal their personal information in order to fulfill the needs of nowadays. However not all personal information can simply be shown to the publics because some might misuse the information they receive.

2.3. The needs and effectiveness of Self-Disclosure

The effects of how people perceived us and how we perceived people are among the reasons we engage in self-disclosure.  The needs of self-belonging are the reasons why we stick to it because we want to have favorable impressions and want people to like us. In order to fulfill the needs, people tend to reveal some of their private information (Psy Blog, 2007)

2.4. Think to avoid in exposing personal information online

According to Utusan Malaysia Online (2016), in previous published article, stated below statement that asking people not to expose their personal information excessively:

“Sindiket penipuan Love Scam antara contoh jenayah siber yang semakin berleluasa. Dilaporkan seb anyak 4,673 kes melibatkan sindiket Love Scam dengan jumlah kerugian sebanyak RM182.3 juta sejak 2013 hingga Mei lalu. Kes seumpama itu meningkat kerana pada hari ini, ramai dilihat suka mengemaskini status dengan perkara yang sepatutnya privasi.”

“Hakikatnya, individu itu sendiri dengan rela hati mendedahkan maklumat kepada penjenayah siber. Lebih parah ada yang sanggup memberitahu seluruh dunia masalah peribadi yang dialami.”

Based on above statement we can simply say that, excessive self-disclosure via online platform however can bring harm towards users. According to one Malaysia’s local websites Beautiful Nara (2015), telling few Not’s while exposing yourself on the internet such as:

• Checked in location
• Sharing unreliable source of news receive
• Excessively posting private pictures
• Regularly updating irrelevant posting that might lead to harm

2.5. Social media

Social media is the mutual of online communications channels committed to community-based input, content based and interactions. Social media is websites and applications dedicated to forums, micro blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curator, and wikis are among the different types of social media.  There are several examples of social media that available today such as Facebook that allows users that has registered to create their own space, keep in touch with long lost friends, family, long distance relationship and colleagues for business purposes.  According to statistics from the Nielsen Group, Internet users within the United States spend more time on Facebook than any other website.  Secondly, Twitter. Twitter is part of micro blogging which allow users to broadcast short status or post within 120-200 alphabets in one tweets. Twitter also allows the users to re-tweet others post that they might find interesting. Third is Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them either publicly or privately on the app. Through Instagram, users can post any photos related to their interest and some tend to share their routine activities.