Some young people create profiles as their friends have, they desire to join in their peer group and to share a common experience with their friends. Joining like-minded peers appeals to their collective self-esteem, which eventually, gives them the unexpected pleasure in expressing themselves on SNS profiles. Often, young people provide specific information (e.g., name, birthdate, relationship status) on SNS, although such disclosure is often considered as personalized.
Profile generation is an explicit act of writing oneself into being a digital environment (Boyd D., 2008) and participants must determine how they want to present themselves to those who may view their self-representation or those they wish might.
With the ability to post, share and tag photos on SNS represents an important advancement in the ability to communicate. Before, if one wanted to share digital photos, one had to email everyone to let them know. With SNS and News Feeds, when one post new photos on Facebook, the friends get automatically notified in their News Feed. People will see the photos on the wall when they visit the profile page.
Apart from being a place for self-presentations, profiles are a place where people gather to converse and share. Conversations happen on profiles and a person's profile reflects their engagements. Consequently, young people do not have complete control over their identities.
Users are asked to invite their friends to the SNS once they have create their profiles. When relationship is confirmed, the two become Friends in SNS and their relationship is included in the public ‘News Feed’ wall.
These four features – profiles, photos, friends and news feed - differentiate Facebook from other types of computer-mediated communication. Many young people join SNS to maintain connections with their friends. While viewing profiles, they are given links to their friends’ friends and so they can spend hours surfing the network, clicking from ‘Friend’ to ‘Friend’. By looking at others’ profiles, young people often get a sense of what types of presentations are socially appropriate; others’ profiles provide critical cues about what to present on their own profile. (Boyd D., 2008) Many young people also manipulate the profiles to express themselves with the choice of pictures and the answers to questions.
As Manuel Castells (1997) points out, identity is people’s source of meaning and experience. From a sociological perspective, humans come into the world with an identity based on qualities such as their gender, race, family’s economic status, etc.
Many young girls are aware that what they are doing on the internet can be seen by others and it can lead to positive or negative reactions from their peers. Orenstein is concerned about younger girls and women and how social media could take a bad turn on things for them. She wants us to know that social media can damage one’s reputation depending on how it is used. Girls post pictures of themselves on the internet in order to attract positive attention from their peers, as well as others who are considered as strangers. They want to be able to seek the attention from others in order to create an audience. As a result of this, Facebook is then used as a “social norm”, meaning that people can judge and form opinions based off of what is seen in an online profile. Orenstein explains that she isn’t trying to put technology in a bad light, because she uses it to keep in contact with her friends and family. She’s mindful about what she puts on the internet, while young adults are making their identities into a
Social Media began affecting our communication and relationships as early as 1969 when the first internet service provider become available to U.S. universities. In 2002, Friendster, the first social media website available to the U.S. was created and gained over 3 million members in just over 3 months. One year later, MySpace launched. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a 24-year-old Harvard student, created Facebook, an online social networking service. This service was originally a way for students to interact. Today it is the world’s largest social networking service and allows over a billion users to connect though posting photos, sharing links, and comments which all appear on a “News Feed” that blasts out this information to all your virtual friends. For the current generation, this new way of communication is facilitating the act of never losing contact with anyone they have ever met. It also allows anyone on this platform to create new relationships with people they are interested in connecting with via internet.
What if you could put your whole life on display for everyone to see? In this decade, such thing is possible with the help of social media sites. If you want to upload pictures, Instagram is available. If you want to write different statuses, Twitter is a step away. If you wanted to do both while interacting with people from across the world, Facebook is the right choice. With the progression of technology and the need for people to show the world who they are, social media sites are becoming increasingly popular. Some people may see this recent boom of social networking as a chance for people to self-brand as well as to present themselves as someone who they are not. As Joel Stein declares in his article You Are Not my Friend, “until we can build some kind of social network where we can present our true, flawed selves, I say we strip down our online communities to just the important parts” (para. 9). While Facebook can be seen as a place for “self-branding” it is a place where someone can analyze someone else as a whole. This allows us to understand someone better and get to know who they really are. By using the method of ethos, pathos and logos, rhetorically analyzing someone’s Facebook profile is easy to do.With the use of one account user’s profile, Jenna LoBello, this essay will show that Facebook can be used more than just somewhere to interact and “show off,” but that it can be used for rhetorical analysis.
Turkle (1995) argues that without coherence, the identity spins off in all directions and that multiplicity can exist only between personalities that can communicate among themselves. Steven G. (1998) states the fragmentation of the individual obstructs the development of the resilent online identity. Ultimately, one can create multiple versions of oneself; different versions of identity can be altered to particular audience. Nonetheless, for most young people these fragmentary social faces are merged into an emotional sense of a single identity. One is able to express more online than one says offline. Thus, hostile exchanges can be found erupting online, then one can abandon that difficult position by abandoning the identity through which it was projected.
...social. Similarly, if people follow the trend of high SNS usage, they will share more information regardless of the privacy policies employed by Facebook. Hence, it is the responsibility of both parties to take steps to enhance the whole social experience.
In the contemporary age of mass media especially in the age of web 2.0, the approaches to self-presentation have been tightly connected to the internet to some extent. As the emergence of personal homepages on the internet, this has been regarded as a newly-born and popular access to express individuals’ self-identities, or even reconstruct their identities. For that individuals could produce any content for whether expressing themselves or sharing their hobbies and experiences. However, there is an ambiguous function of the personal homepages on shaping individuals’ identity. Charles Cheung’s essay in 2004 about the identity construction and self-presentation on personal homepages is an appropriate example of showing the analysis of both the emancipatory potential and reality constrains of the personal homepage.
In this day and age, cyberspace is ever growing, and constantly expanding the integration between networks. Through the use of social media, virtual gaming worlds, and networking, we have been able to manipulate the way we appear within cyberspace. We create users and accounts online, in which we are encouraged to use our real names, and place selection and emphasis on certain aspects of our identities we choose to expose, and illuminate to the online world. We can manipulate our online identity into whatever we desire, users can change race, gender, age, class, and completely change their persona if they aspire to, this in turn re-conceptualizes their identities. Nakamura states, “The technology of the Internet offers its participants unprecedented possibilities for communicating with each other in real time, and for controlling the conditions of their own self-representations in ways impossible...
We represent ourselves digitally in various ways to construct our identities. Operating anonymously by constantly changing aliases is a way for nobody to know your true identity, yet you are still trying to figure out who you are. Sherry Turkle believed that ‘most use the digital domain to exercise a more true identity, or a multiplicity of identities.” (Silver, 2003). According to Turkle, we create online identities to help understand our offline lives. An example is the use of avatars, where individuals create an icon to represent themselves. We construct ourselves by allowing our true self be viewed by people worldwide without the fear of rejection. Turkle claims that the online world allows us to “project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star.” (Soules, 2001). We create fictional characters with different personali...
Identity is a state of mind in which someone recognizes/identifies their character traits that leads to finding out who they are and what they do and not that of someone else. In other words it's basically who you are and what you define yourself as being. The theme of identity is often expressed in books/novels or basically any other piece of literature so that the reader can intrigue themselves and relate to the characters and their emotions. It's useful in helping readers understand that a person's state of mind is full of arduous thoughts about who they are and what they want to be. People can try to modify their identity as much as they want but that can never change. The theme of identity is a very strenuous topic to understand but yet very interesting if understood. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki are two remarkable books that depict the identity theme. They both have to deal with people that have an identity that they've tried to alter in order to become more at ease in the society they belong to. The families in these books are from a certain country from which they're forced to immigrate into the United States due to certain circumstances. This causes young people in the family trauma and they must try to sometimes change in order to maintain a comfortable life. Both authors: Alvarez and Houston have written their novels Is such an exemplifying matter that identity can be clearly depicted within characters as a way in adjusting to their new lives.
Social networks are the “state of the art” of communication. Today’s technology allows social networks to offer a great variety of services to the users, including sharing photos, chatting with others, sharing posts and thoughts, adding friends to a person’s social circle, or even be reminded of friend’s birthdays and others. These characteristics are defining the new way to socialize and interact virtually with others. Because of the fast expansion of these social networks, it is inevitable that adolescents will be highly exposed to this kind of interaction; social networks will become a more important part of their lives as time goes by, leaving them with no choice to w...
I had a few specific goals when creating my Screen Self-Portrait--I wanted to integrate different aspects of my digital identity and identity experience, provide unspoken insight about my activity in different networks, and make a colorful, aesthetically pleasing (at least by my standards) account of my identity experience. I successfully reached all of my goals in 4 steps: Reflecting on my digital identity and identity experience, thinking about and purposely choosing the minuscule pieces of my self to display, arranging said pieces in a thoughtful manner, and editing/reviewing my work to accurately create my Screen Self-Portrait.
Bloggers are free to recreate their personality in the virtual community. This situation gives people the perfect opportunity to change the way they portray themselves to others. It is their chance to be someone else. In “The Good, the Bad, and the Internet,” Globus supports the idea that alternative personalities are used online by stating, “In cyberspace, looks don’t count. You can also choose to share only the things about yourself that you consider flattering. You can also adopt new behaviors or even a whole new identity.” (Globus) McLaren continues by stating, “You can’t ever really know if they are who they say they are.” (Globus) After all, 24 percent of teenagers who were questioned about using different Internet communication tools admitted to pretending to be someone else while online (Globus).
One aspect of social networks is for people to represent themselves to the world in a self-designed homepage or profile. This allows users to create a persona that they feel uncomfortable or unw...
This paper aims to explore the different reasons behind people having different personas in Twitter and real-life through a look at how the social networking site provides a unique opportunity for self...
Most common among young adults and teens, social networking plays a significant role in the social lives of adolescents. The teenage years are “a time of identity formation and role development” (Pew Internet and American Life Project 11). Online identity among friends and peers has now become as significant as one’s own personal identity, in that online information can be seen by many and online interactions have become a primary source of communication. As a result, teens tend to concentrate greatly on social life and now a majority use social networking sites and other social media as an outlet for this personal growth.