Mediated Identities

After doing many subjects relating to social networks and digital communication, I think it would be most appropriate if I did my final project on something related to that area.

One of the key concepts I found interesting, and will inevitably have to look at, is how our online representation relates to the idea of identity. We can look at this in relation to peoples Facebook timelines/profiles.

The profile itself and everything that we publish on Facebook relates to our ‘front’ stage performance of what we want others to see. Stone (1981, p. 188) states that this is our ‘identity announcement’, which in essence is our claim to the identity that we want. This correlates to the ‘identity placement’ which Stone (1981, p. 188) also talks about, which is how other people see us and our identity. An ‘identity’ itself is established when the two match up into a ‘coincidence of placements and announcements’ (Stone, 1981, p. 188). This then presents the idea that there could be issues if an identity claim and placement don’t match up, in that it could lead to social punishment should this happen.

Keeping on this area, we can examine social media under the scope of Goffman’s (1959) idea of multiple identities. For example, we have the various online selves, versus our multiple real life selves. Further, Robinson (2007, p 96) brings up the idea of ‘selfing’ while also referring to Goffman’s (1959) idea of dramaturgy saying ”These expressions and performances aid the self in constructing the kind of self-identity appropriate to the audience’s expectations and the definition of the interactional situation.”

This will be interesting to examine further in the research project and the notion of identity in relation to Facebook profiles and use will prove to be particularly interesting!

References

Goffman, E, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books

Robinson, L, 2007, ‘The cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age’, New Media and Society, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 93-110

Stone, G, 1981, Appearance and the self: a slightly revised version, in Stone & Faberman (eds.), Social psychology through symbolic interaction, 2^nd edn, pp. 187-202, New York: Wiley