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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISrelated to self disclosure and relationship development, extraverted people should be more comfortableinitiating self disclosure for the purpose of developing relationships. Accordingly, extraverted people shouldhave increasingly relaxed boundaries of privacy and may be more willing to offer personal informationonline. By contrast, as past studies suggest, introverted individuals tend to have greater concerns for personalprivacy (Webster, 1998, Zweig & Webster, 2003). Past studies have also demonstrated a positive associationbetween extraversion and self disclosure (Archer, 1979, Levesque et al., 2002) and we expected thisrelationship will be manifested in the blogosphere, too. Thus,H2: Extraversion is positively related to perceived levels of self disclosure on blogs.2.3 Perceived Context and Self DisclosureIn addition to individual traits, the decision to reveal personal thoughts and feelings is also affected bycontextual factors, such as the intended audience and the intimacy level of particular relationships (Berger &Derlega, 1987), as well as characteristics of the media in which disclosure occurs (Joinson & Paine, 2007).As more and more human communication is conducted on the Internet, self-disclosure in cyberspace hasbecome a focal point of research. Prior studies have found high levels of self disclosure using computermediatedchannels (Rosson, 1999, Ben-Ze'ev, 2003; Tidwell & Walther, 2002). This phenomenon is oftenlinked to the anonymity, or the lack of identifiability, afforded by the communication media (McKenna,2007). When Internet users withhold information regarding who they are in the real world, their onlinebehaviors are detached from their offline identity. The result is an disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004) in thatsocial norms and expectations that embedded in real-world identities and relationships no longer inhibitpeople from revealing their “important inner or ‘true’ aspects of self”(McKenna, 2007, p. 205). At the sametime, if bloggers cannot be identified by their readers, it reduces the likelihood of suffering from the negativeconsequences discussed above since the content of the disclosure cannot be associated with bloggers’ reallifeidentities. In the context of blogs, blog authors in general are in control regarding how much identityrelatedinformation they would like to provide on their profile pages or blog posts. Accordingly, they shouldhave a pretty good idea regarding the degree to which they can be recognized by their readers. Thisperception of identifiability should then play a role in their decisions to reveal personal or intimateinformation about themselves online. In light of the evidence summarized above, the following hypothesis isproposed:H3: Perceived identifiability is negatively related to perceived levels of self disclosure on blogs.As discussed above, there are a variety of psychological and relational risks associated with interpersonalself disclosure. The perception of these risks typically functions to restrain people from revealing too muchpersonal information. For diary-style bloggers who give public access to their posts, these risks areheightened. Due to the potentially enormous size of audiences, the authors of public blogs are more likely tobe exploited than those bloggers who restrict access. Although prior studies suggest that bloggers are awareof the sensitive nature of posting intimate personal information online, they also pondered about whether ornot the topics were too intimate (Viégas, 2005) and adjusted their writing styles to suit their audience.(Schiano et al., 2004). Similarly, bloggers should also respond to privacy concerns and vulnerability issuesthey perceive. The more conscious bloggers are regarding the hazards of disclosing online, the less likelythey should be to post intimate personal information on their blogs. Thus,H4: Perceived vulnerability is negatively related to perceived levels of self disclosure on blogs.3. METHOD3.1 Data CollectionTo address the research question and hypotheses presented above, we conducted an online survey of aninternational sample of bloggers. The sample was produced by first examining several major blog hostingservice sites, including blogger.com and livejournal.com. At the time of this study, only blogger.com offereda working random blog selection feature. This was determined by personal correspondence with the bloghosting sites. Using the random blog pointer on blogger.com, a list of one thousand unique blogs was246