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To understand the phenomena of people revealing regrettable information on the Internet, we examine who people think they’re addressing, and what they say, in the process of interacting with those not physically or temporally co-present.

We conduct qualitative analyses of interviews with student bloggers and observations of five years’ worth of their blog posts, drawing on linguists’ concepts of indexical ground and deictics. Based on analyses of how bloggers reference their shared indexical ground and how they use deictics, we expose bloggers’ evolving awareness of their audiences, and the relationship between this awareness and their disclosures.

Over time, writers and their regular audience, or “chorus,” reciprocally reveal personal information. However, since not all audience members reveal themselves in this venue, writers’ disclosures are available to those observers they are not aware of. Thus, their overdisclosure is tied to what we call the “n-adic” organization of online interaction. Specifically, and as can be seen in their linguistic cues, n-adic utterances are directed toward a non-unified audience whose invisibility makes the discloser unable to find out the exact number of participants or the time they enter or exit the interaction.

Attention to linguistic cues, such as deictics, is a compelling way to identify the shifting reference groups of ethnographic subjects interacting with physically or temporally distant others.

We describe the social organization of interaction with undetectable others. n-adic interactions likely also happen in other on- and offline venues in which participants are obscured but can contribute anonymously.

Three recent cases of false allegation of sexual abuse are described and compared. Neither the needs of alleged perpetrators nor the people with learning disabilities are adequately addressed by current practices. Key issues for service development are discussed.

Scholars of race and work have shown that social categories shape how individuals interact with coworkers and clients. Social categories also inform the creation of roles within an organization when nonwhites are hired to interact with other nonwhites. This study examines these roles, or racialized labor, and illustrates how racial categories govern organizational behavior. By studying immigrant-serving providers at a range of nonprofits, this chapter shows how the assumed relationship between racial category and knowledge is evidence of ethnoracial logics, or the practice of using racial categories to organize work because of assumptions about the inherent racial ethnic knowledge an employee possesses. To make the case for these logics, the chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Latino, Latina, and White nonprofit professionals to show how expertise is developed and differentiated along racial lines.