Part of my work on the PVN project has focused on online self-disclosure. This particular paper describes a case study of disclosure among weight loss bloggers. Research shows that obesity has a social stigma in western society which leads to discriminatory attitudes towards overweight and obese people. In real life overweight people are in Goffmans’ terms (1968) discredited individuals (e.g. their differentness is evident on the spot). On the Internet however, their weight problems are not immediately perceivable by those they communicate with: in this context they have become discreditable individuals who can actively manage information about their overweight by either telling or not telling.

Despite the offline reluctance of individuals to talk openly about weight issues, there is an abundance of personal weblogs about weight loss with remarkably open accounts of everything to do with overweight. While the widespread use of personal blogs offer opportunities for interaction and communication they also raise privacy concerns. There are both potential positive and negative consequences for stigmatized individuals of online (self-) disclosure.

The paper uses a survey with both open-ended and closed questions to examine the extent of online disclosure among adult weight loss bloggers. We are interested to find out why people are willing to disclose information which has a social stigma offline? Do the bloggers remain anonymous or do they disclose their identities? The research shows that weight loss blogs empower many of its writers to use their voice to gain more self-confidence and become more open about stigmatized issues. Overall, weight loss blogging seems to bring more positives than negatives for our respondents. Instead of ‘careless relinquishment of privacy’ by individuals, it seems to be more a case of what Koskela (2004) calls ‘empowering exhibitionism’ whereby the bloggers receive benefits due to their voluntary disclosure of personal information. They make social connections and build up a community of likeminded people which helps them in their struggle to lose their excess weight. Finding a strong online community with likeminded people who give moral support, feedback and reinforcement, does not only boost self-esteem and feelings of happiness, but will also help weight loss bloggers reach their goal. Studies have shown that those who have a social support system in place lose more weight than those who do not. In this sense the internet can be utilized as a technology for the improvement of well-being. In our follow-up study whereby we will interview bloggers and analyse their blogs we will examine in further detail whether these gains are constrained to the online context or whether they also have an impact in the offline interpersonal context.

So privacy is hard: to define, to value, to implement. As Seda Gürses, studying how to incorporate privacy into social networks, said, privacy is a process, not an event. “You can’t do x and say, Now I have protected privacy.”

Here are the slides I used in a short presentation on how privacy issues are being debated in the UK’s current general election: