Advances in social media technologies have brought unprecedented opportunities for communicating self on different online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Many of these platforms facilitate self-disclosure to a network, which blurs boundaries between what is public and what is private, and raises questions about new self-disclosure practices. In this talk we will explore socio-cognitive dynamics underlying self-disclosure exchanges, including motivations that drive people to share personal information in online networks and factors that influence psychological rewards people draw from it. We will also discuss issues of well-being and mental health in relation to communication in social media.

About the speaker: Natalie Bazarova is an assistant professor in communication and director of the Social Media Lab at Cornell University. Her research examines social interactions mediated by information and communication technology in dyads, groups and networks, with a particular emphasis on self-disclosure, privacy, wellbeing and personal relationships. Her work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, United States Department of Agriculture, Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences and Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research. She is a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences for the 2015-16 academic year.

The lecture series is made possible with support from the John D. Evans Foundation.