Self-disclosure

We are social beings who make sense of the world through our various relationships. We have family members, friends, acquaintances, teammates, neighbors, colleagues, golfing buddies, girlfriends and boyfriends, loved ones and even enemies, just to name a few. Some of these relationships evolve through a force of their own; we can’t choose our parents or siblings, and we can lose touch with our neighbors as they move to a new neighborhood. Culture and social norms will heavily influence the way we manage our relationships: it is a lot more acceptable to lose touch with your college buddies than with your mother. For the most part, however, we have a great deal of control over our relationships and we get to decide which relationships are most worthy of our attention. While we can’t choose our siblings, we can choose the person who we want to have children of our own with. We also go through considerable effort to keep some relationships intact even when our life situations change. The quote by Simmel illustrates how different relationships evolve from casual to more

meaningful ones. When we want to let certain people into our lives, we engage in self-disclosure and start sharing information with them that we wouldn’t divulge to just anybody, even making ourselves vulnerable (Jourard and Lasakow 1958; Archer 1980; McKenna et al. 2002). If other people react to our self-disclosing acts the way we had hoped and engage in reciprocal self-disclosure, the relationship will deepen (Gouldner 1960; Jourard 1964; Cozby 1972). As an example, think of how dating usually works: on the first date a couple might discuss mundane subjects such as where they went to college or their favorite films, but if they get along, soon they might be sharing their personal hopes and dreams or even sexual fantasies. Self-disclosure happens as acts within communication, as specific utterances within the flow

of a conversation. The primary focus of this chapter is to investigate how self-disclosure has been affected by the massive changes the digital revolution has brought to how we communicate with

one another. We now communicate via instant messages, social media, emails, video chat, forum platforms and the like. We can now transcend the spatial boundaries that would deny us from interacting whenever and with whomever we wish to. Self-disclosure is a staple and wellstudied subject in social sciences, especially within social psychology (see e.g., Cozby 1973; Derlega et al. 1993). To do justice to the rich body of literature within the pages of this chapter is a near-impossible task, but I will attempt to provide a passable overview on previous research. As my own background is in more culturally oriented consumer research, a large part of this chapter is dedicated to discussing some of the cultural changes that the digital revolution has brought to self-disclosure. I argue that there is a growing demand for more transparency of the self, which is driven by marketers, techno-cultural evangelists and even consumers. From the marketers’ side, this shift for demanding more consumer self-disclosure is due to the rise of so-called relationship marketing. I will discuss the implications of these developments and what kind of new directions they offer for researchers. Self-disclosure has some rather obvious overlapping aspects with consumer privacy issues (Andrejevic 2002; John et al. 2010). However, as this volume already contains a dedicated chapter on privacy, discussing privacy issues within this chapter will be limited.