A cultural perspective on online self-disclosure: motivations, adaptations, and co-constitutive dynamics

This article advances a cultural perspective that reconceptualizes online self-disclosure as a communicative process. Rather than viewing it as merely individual psychological acts, the framework situates disclosure practices as deeply embedded in broader social and cultural frameworks. Extending Markus and Kitayama’s (1991, 2010) theory, this article presents a mutually constitutive dynamic in which cultural orientations configure disclosure motivations and content, adaptation processes enable situated negotiation of norm variations, and individual practices continuously reproduce and reshape collective norms in digitally mediated spaces. Unlike traditional cross-cultural approaches that treat cultural orientations as static national predictors, the model integrates hybridity, multi-level cultural influences, as well as platform architectures as active cultural systems. This perspective reveals how online self-disclosure both reflects and actively reshapes culturally differentiated selves over time and fosters more inclusive theories of online self-disclosure across diverse mediated contexts.