Dear all, I'm writing about some of the factors that keep people posting to social networks for my upcoming book "Sharing Our Lives Online- Risks and Exposure in Social Media". One of the ones I'm considering is the potential stigmatisation of those who “stick out" in their peer groups for either not participating at all on social networks or keeping a very low profile. I've seen a few studies about why people choose not to join eg: Eric P.S. Baumer, Phil Adams, Vera D. Khovanskaya, Tony C. Liao, Madeline E. Smith, Victoria Schwanda Sosik, and Kaiton Williams. 2013. Limiting, leaving, and (re)lapsing: an exploration of facebook non-use practices and experiences. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3257-3266. DOI=10.1145/2470654.2466446 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2470654.2466446 Pavica Sheldon, Profiling the non-users: Examination of life-position indicators, sensation seeking, shyness, and loneliness among users and non-users of social network sites, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 28, Issue 5, September 2012, Pages 1960-1965, ISSN 0747-5632, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.05.016. Tufekci, Z. (2008). Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and MySpace: What Can We Learn About These Sites From Those Who Won’t Assimilate? . Information, Communication & Society, 11(4), 544 - 564. but they don't talk much about how people are perceived if they don't participate (though Baumer et al mention pressure to join on p. 4) Marwick, A. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. has some on this but the SF tech community is perhaps an outlier case? Anyway I hope you can suggest some alternatives! ...And Happy holidays to one and all! -- Dr David Brake, FHEA (@drbrake http://davidbrake.org/) Senior Lecturer, Journalism & Communications, University of Bedfordshire