Relationship Between Privacy and Facebook Usage of Female Digital Immigrants

Akikol, Rahime (Arel Author)In today's postmodern society, the social structure has really affected individualization, and electronic devices that bring about digital culture have enabled connections between people thorough social networks. Currently, it is seen as a necessity to belong to the electronic social environment. In the social network context, the culture of personal presentation and 'inner self' in public space is not only popular among adolescents and youths, but now includes female digital immigrants who tend to display as much as possible. However, the attitudes of digital immigrants are different because of differences in age as well as cultural and educational backgrounds. To reveal the relationship between Facebook usage and privacy, a semi-structured interview was conducted with eight people obtained through objective snowball sampling. A questionnaire containing 25 questions was prepared using the data from the interviews and distributed to 367 people in different regions of Turkey. The obtained data were analyzed in the SPSS package. The research findings indicate that female digital immigrants share their personal information with a large number of people because of their direct communications through Facebook and thus tend to show their private lives to the public