Social media applications encourage people to provide personal information as part of their business model, but often, putting personal information online is interpreted by researchers and the media alike as a lack of concern for privacy. This ignores the fact that participating in social information-sharing has many benefits, including intimacy, friendship, and status. There are strong social pressures to participate in social media in the technology scene. Nonparticipation marks one as an outsider and a Luddite, and limits how far one can go in the community, and perhaps professionally as well. Rather than expecting theories about privacy in the public sphere to explain these behaviors, we can understand information disclosure as an act of publicizing the self to a networked audience. The value of visibility and access motivates people to share with each other, resulting in affective benefits.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 639