ABSTRACT
Despite conceptualising greater openness as a route to enhancing online safety, the Facebook model, in voraciously promoting one identity tied to people real names, is a system that collapses social contexts and raises substantial privacy and safety issues in the process. The environmental boundaries people typically rely on in the physical world to help create discrete social contexts, for example, are removed – generating what leading scholars in the area have referred to as "context collapse". Attempts to circumvent the situation where one's profiles on Gaydar and Facebook were effectively linked by removing oneself from the Facebook environment would be to limit access to the people and social capital contained within one's own personal networks. Alongside the arrival of Facebook, with its comparatively greater privacy and safety concerns, and the extension of gay men's networks into that space, however, that level of control was significantly reduced for those men who chose to use both of the sites.
