Semi-public end-user content contributions—A case-study of concerns and intentions in online photo-sharing

As social networks and rich media sharing are increasingly converging, end-user concerns regarding to whom, how and why to direct a certain digital content emerge. Between the pure private contribution and the pure public contribution exists a large research and design space of semi-public content and relationships. The theoretical framework of gift-giving correlates to semi-public contributions in that it envelopes social relationships, concerns for others and reciprocity, and was consequently adopted in order to reveal and classify qualitative semi-public end-user concerns with content contribution. The data collection was performed through online ethnographic methods in a large photo-sharing network. The main data-collection method used was forum message elicitation, combined with referential methods such as interviews and application observation and usage. The analysis of data resulted in descriptions concerning end-user intentions to address dynamic recipient groupings, the intentions to control the level of publicness of both digital content and its related social metadata (tags, contacts, comments and links to other networks) and the conclusion that users often refrained from providing material unless they felt able to control its direction.