What Google Plus allows users to do is create circles in which you "Share" information to specific audiences. People could occupy multiple circles or a single circle. A user could add anyone to his/her circle. That means that that person would receive all status updates, just to use facebook terminology for simplicity. The recipient of that information has total control. S/he could block that person or hide his/her status updates. When someone "Shares" information with another person, that person could then add him/her to a circle. Now, both parties can always view each other's information. In theory, this is very similar to facebook; however, the privacy settings in facebook are far more confusing to most people. I set my privacy settings to have only my friends view my status updates, yet total strangers can still message me, which makes me wonder what else they can learn about me on facebook. Google Plus was supposed to resolve this problem by simplifying the process. In theory.
In practice, my students were completely confused by how Google Plus worked. I instructed for them to answer a set of questions by simply answering them as a status update. The day after class, I received a flood of emails about where to post their answers. Students were looking for the questions. They assumed that there would be one central location for each of them to access to then share their perspectives. The power behind an online social network is its decentralized infrastructure. Given that students had been using facebook for a few years now, this should have been apparent to students. On the contrary, it did not make sense to students to "just starting talking" in a response to a specific question in a specific rhetorical situation. This begs the question, how do students construct their sense of audience in spaces like facebook? Who are they speaking to when they compose? There have been several fun articles about profiles of facebook users (e.g., 12 Most Annoying Types of Facebookers). And I'm sure students must fall into one of those categories at some point, like the TMIer, who posts pictures of herself, half-naked and fully drunk. In these situations, there doesn't seem to be confusion about who is the audience, nor do students question where to post or how to "just start talking."
It appears that students have internalized the infrastructure of an online social network, making it transparent during communicative interactions. When students were asked to transfer to a new social media infrastructure within an academic context, they appropriated past literacy experiences of doing school, which is based on centralized, top-down structures of authority and knowledge. When students ask, "Where are the questions?," they are searching for the authoritative symbolic figure who administers questions and evaluates responses. When no such figure existed within the social network, they were forced to examine the design and affordances of Google Plus.
"How does this work?" they asked. My response, "It's just like facebook, you just start talking" didn't seem to clarify much. To resolve the confusion, I walked my students through a communicative exchange. I wrote on my "wall": "Hello class." I then checked each students' computer to make sure my greeting appeared on their "wall." I then made sure students saw each other's computers so they could see with their eyes that it worked. Next, I had students respond, "Hello, professor." On the projector, 18 posts of the same greeting appeared on the screen. Students could see for themselves that they could "just start talking" and that their audience was right there in the class next to them.
