Presentation Overview
Dr. Wisniewski will be giving a research presentation on how privacy can be framed as an interpersonal boundary regulation process that helps individuals optimize their social interactions with others online. The end goal is designing technologies that enable humans to simultaneously foster meaningful connections with others and protect themselves from harm. Her view of privacy as a necessary social mechanism for engaging with others departs from tradition privacy paradigms, which tend to view privacy as contentious to social media’s goal of sharing and connecting. Instead, Dr. Wisniewski’s research shows evidence that social privacy is not just about limiting information disclosures online; it involves many facets of interpersonal relationship management that, when properly managed, can actually help individuals feel more socially connected. Further, the way in which users negotiate their privacy boundaries within social media is complex, varies by user, and is an on-going process. Thus, Dr. Wisniewski’s research promotes technology solutions that go beyond simply designing privacy settings that prevent information privacy breaches, to solutions that more closely emulate how humans engage with one another in the real world. Using qualitative and quantitative methodologies, she will present results from her dissertation and post doctoral research that lend deeper insight into the privacy and social media behaviors of both adults and adolescents.
Speaker Biography
Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology (IT) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. Dr. Wisniewski graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a Ph.D. in Computing and Information Systems. She was recently a Post Doctoral Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University, working for one of Human-Computer Interaction’s (HCI’s) founding fathers, Jack Carroll. Dr. Wisniewski also has over 6 years of industry experience as a systems developer/business analyst in the IT industry. Dr. Wisniewski’s research interests are situated at the juxtaposition of HCI, Social Computing, and Privacy. An emerging theme across her research has been regulating the boundaries between how individuals manage their relationships with technology and how they manage their social interactions with others through the use of technology. Her goal is to frame privacy as a means to not only protect end users, but more importantly, to enrich online social interactions that individuals share with others. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to address these research questions by integrating literature in HCI, social psychology, and information systems in order to develop relevant theories and suggest design practices that better support how humans engage with and through technology. Her work has won best paper (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at premier conferences in her field.
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