PRIVACY AND SECURITY TRIBULATIONS IN THE DIGITAL CULTURE

Abstract

The ethnographic research project profiles a Southwestern Pennsylvania university’s digital culture to understand cybersecurity and device protection literacy. This research will attempt to understand if the higher education digital culture shares the same meanings and associations with social media and communication technologies as the past literature demonstrates. To frame the IRB approved ethnographic observation (n=23), the researcher will utilize Boyd’s (2014) four constructs: persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability. The findings conclude similarities in the higher education digital domain to the K-12 culture. The results also conclude the possibility of more significant naïve actions towards security and technology privacy negligence.