In everyday life, people segment their social lives to manage their time, impressions, and relationships. For example, individuals commonly segment their social worlds into distinct domains such as home and work. This research investigates individuals' everyday use of multiple electronic mail addresses and instant messaging usernames to segment and integrate their lives.
Email remains the dominant form of online communication. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 91% of Internet users have sent or received email, while 36% send instant messages, and 35% send or receive text messages using a cell phone. My own preliminary interviews, others' research data and a cursory analysis of market research data all indicate that the use of multiple addresses is both common and mainstream and that at least half of all email users maintain multiple email addresses. Although this behavior is widespread, we know little about the motivations leading to it or the effects that it causes. Researchers have infrequently examined the more complex ways individuals use multiple identifiers in online communication to negotiate multiple domains—using strategies that include both segmentation and integration.
The primary mechanisms that people use to communicate online are still predominantly textual—email, instant messaging, mobile text messaging, social networks, etc. Most forms of online communication require us to construct and supply identifiers in order to communicate. These identifiers can be seen as a logical extension of Erving Goffman's "face." Individually identifying someone is essential to communication if we are to know that we are talking to the same person, and not to another person or to multiple people.
Identifying a specific person in communication, while traditionally challenging, has become more complicated as the number of individual identifiers has increased dramatically. Online identifiers for communication differ from other identifiers in that they typically uniquely identify a person as well as a communication channel. In addition to people's desires—social, technical, and policy forces constrain the construction of online identifiers. We have only limited choice in creating these identifiers even though they affect with whom we connect, who connects to us, as well as the form of communication.
The study will consist of two populations, one in a regulated industry with substantial constraints on communication in the workplace and one in an unregulated industry with minimal constraints. The comparison will provide the opportunity to explore social and technical issues in populations whose needs, uses, strategies and technology differ from one another. Understanding the strategies and explanations for people's use of multiple online identifiers will provide a lens through which to examine the segmentation and integration of social worlds. An understanding of the multiple functions of online identifiers can better inform the design and implementation of technical infrastructure to support those functions.