Help! My mother wants to follow me on Instagram! : Which strategies do young adults in Sweden use, when facing context and time collapse.

Abstract: Young adults spend a lot of their time on social media where they share their lives with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, ect. Wesch (2009) explains that things posted on social media such as YouTube can be viewed by anybody, everybody, and nobody, anywhere in the world all at once. This becomes a problem for young adults as several different audiences blend into one (i.e. context collapse) (Brandtzaeg, Lüder & Skjetne,2010). For example, how would it feel if your mother saw a video of you at a party which was posted for friends to joke about? However, Brandtzaeg and Lüders (2018) states that is not the only problem. Social media also blurs the line between the present and the past. One example can be a friend commenting on a silly post on facebook you made years ago, then it appears in everyone's feed again making it seem as if you have posted it recently. Both of these problems make young adults change how they chose to self-presentate themselves on social media. In addition, since social media is asynchronous as content does not take place in real-time, it provides time to be more strategic as well as for more polished forms of self-presentation and self-censorship(Gardner & Davis, 2013; Lindgren, 2017). With foundation in this, this study is going to examine which strategies young adults use that are related to self-presentation on the occasion of facing context and time-collapse. The study will focus on to what extent the participants use the tactics mentioned in earlier literature as well as how different aspects relate to the tactics one chooses to use. In order to create an understanding of context- and time collapse previous research has been examined. Furthermore, previous research about self-presentation in general and self-presentation on social media inparticular is examined to connect to how self-presentation can be disturbed by context- and time collapse. Finally, theories and research about privacy is used to gather an understanding of how young adults experiencecontext and time collapse as a problem for their privacy. Through a survey, data have been collected from 226 respondents to be examined, presented and analyzed. The respondents were born between the years 1997 and 2004. The result showed that all of the strategies were used yet the extent varied depending on the strategy. However, the most commonly used strategies were connected to self-censoring. Moreover, there are relations between the strategies and for example gender, how long one had social media, how one perceives oneself etc.However, surprisingly the relations were for the most part weak even though some stand out as a bit stronger.