Close friends instagram story2/10/2024 ![]() But when she’d previously opened up on Facebook about her mental-health struggles, she’d run straight into context collapse. In recent years, Thomas has experienced depressive episodes and wanted to talk about it on social media. “How do we, as a culture, talk about things if we’re not willing to share those things?” People want to believe that their voices resonate, especially when it comes to sensitive issues around politics or shifting cultural norms or even personal struggles. This propensity to share publicly isn’t just about vanity, though. “We have become a world where unless we share it, it didn’t necessarily happen,” she said. ![]() “A lot of us feel very strongly about things we see on the news and things we see in the world, and the ability to speak out in a way that feels public, but also safe, is maybe a good thing.”ĭevra Thomas, a 44-year-old arts administrator in Wake Forest, North Carolina, told me that social media often feels like a performance to her. ![]() “Even on a group of so-called close friends, something feels more public … like you’re putting views out into the world and taking a stand in a way that feels different than sharing it with a private friend,” Adam Kleinbaum, an associate professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business who studies the relationship between social networks and echo chambers, told me. “It’s akin to being at a wedding and giving a speech to friends, parents, in-laws, and people you don’t know.” Jokes about your college exploits, for instance, won’t necessarily land with your Boomer relatives as they might with your best friends.īeyond privacy, the feature sometimes has a deeper payoff: It provides an option to be heard and feel validated in a safe yet open space of your own creation. The feature’s advantage is that it mitigates the effects of what social scientists call “context collapse-the idea that on social, there’s a flattening of multiple audiences in one space,” Elia Powers, an associate professor in the mass-communication department at Towson University, told me. Though the app, with its recent attempts to mimic TikTok, has bred frustration and seems to be growing irrelevant among Gen Z, Close Friends is a corner of the platform that many still find useful. Instagram arguably edges out the competition with its Close Friends feature, which allows people to share Stories with a curated list of followers that is stored in their user settings. And Twitter’s protected-Tweets feature isn’t ideal if you have a large following the “Retweet” button may be disabled, but your followers can still screenshot and share what you post. On TikTok, unless you want a fully private account, you have to select who can see each and every video before you post. Facebook seems to constantly adjust its privacy settings, and it can be difficult to tell what information your friends have access to. Many of these options aren’t terribly helpful, though. Almost every social-media platform offers its users an option to privatize their account-a way for people to control who engages with their content, often to avoid the judgment, schadenfreude, bullying, and snark that are ubiquitous online.
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