From Strangers to Friends - Augmenting Face-to-face Interactions with Faceted Digital Self-Presentations.

Sharing a digital presentation of self amongst collocated people can be used to enhance social interactions by supporting conversations. However, as there are different levels of disclosure within social relationships, it is currently unknown how to facet people’s digital content towards others. This research investigates faceting digital self-presentations according to the audience by looking at the differences in the creation and usage of private profiles (shared with a friend) and public profiles (shared amongst strangers) in face-to-face interactions. Digital profiles were accessed through head-mounted displays in social gatherings. Over three gatherings with twenty participants, we identified the importance of having different profiles. We found that, for strangers, public profile supported starting and maintaining conversations. For friends, the private profile was designed to support deeper social penetration, and for close friends, the private profile was designed from the friendship maintenance perspective. Additionally, participants wished to disclose content from their private profile to strangers as the conversations developed. These results suggest that there is a need for a tailored way of faceting digital self-presentation towards multiple audiences. We propose using augmentations that consist of a base profile that is shared with all collocated others, and a dynamically tailorable part, which can be targeted to specific individuals.