Stage Fright

Description
Just as in real life, some people have trouble achieving what they want in front of a large audience. In social medias this becomes a serious problem for users with stage fright, as almost all their content can be read by all their friends. Since all their friends can read and criticize their content, they are to afraid to post at all, or do it in other, unorthodox ways, usually resulting in spam.

Examples
The user is to reluctant to post status updates, but want to share some specific content. The user have different strategies to make it possible anyhow. One is to send a personalized personal messages to everyone, thus eliminating the stage fright, as with personal messages it is then much more personal. Another is to create fake accounts. Each of these accounts would only be friends with a limited amount of friends, reducing the stage fright.

Pros and Cons
This pattern is obviously not wanted. Both G+, Facebook, Flickr, etc, have made changes that could potentially reduce this behavior; groups and circles. The design solutions investigated are however not designed to combat stage fright, but rather to help controlling private information. This is far from enough to combat all types of Stage Fright.

A solution could be to make it possible that for each action, the user is able to choose exactly which other users is able see and interact with that specific action.

Relations
The pattern stems from the fact that social medias are designed around Public Sharing (Crumlish & Malone) to allow users to see what their friends are doing. The leading design seems to be that each user is able to see what all of this or her friends are doing. Other patters related to Stage Fright are Self Censoring and Fear Of Failing.

The difference between Stage Fright, Fear Of Failing and Self Censoring can be hard to distinguish. The main difference is that Stage Fright is not about the fear of failing, or making something wrong, but the fear of publicly speaking in itself. It could be a subset of Fear Of Failing but does not have to. The relation to Self Censoring is different, in the consequences of the pattern. While Self Censoring have the user censoring herself, Stage Fright have the user using other mechanics to get the message through. However, just as in the relation with Fear Of Failing, Stage Fright could be a subset of Self Censoring, but does not have to be one.

Contributors
Created by Christian Broniewicz, from interviews.