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.
Individuals conceived between the years of 1980 and 2000, as indicated by this article, experience serious difficulties finding their actual self due to the online networking outlets; they regularly depict another person life of a fantasy dream American life on the web. As today’s more youthful era makes the transition to adulthood, trying to accommodate between online and offline characters can be hard. “Van den Bergh asked 4,056 individuals, ages 15 to 25, when they felt they were or weren't being genuine online or logged off, with companions, folks, accomplices or employers.” Through this research he found,
To build a house, we need a strong base. With a strong base, we would be able to have a better foundation for the house, so it depended on us to choose what kind of base we want to use to build our house. Just like a house, an identity for an individual, is about making a decision, and that decision will shape their identity. A couple years ago, it never crossed in my mind, that one day I would live someplace away from home, family, and friends. I thought I had everything in life, and it made me never grateful with what I had. But then, I made a decision to move to United States, and since I moved to United States, I became a responsible and a grateful person.
However, what many internet users do not realize that the internet web evaluates one’s thoughts and bases the outcome information to where it satisfies the user’s need. As Anderson notes “everything we do is thrown in to a big calculation. Like they’re watching us right now” (97). For example, most social media websites have now adapted and dedicated major space of their website as a portion of advertisement which, in fact, it advertises for products based on individual interest and his/her pervious search. Furthermore, following social media trends and sharing our personal thoughts about specific topic on the internet are some of the aspects that the internet studies about our identities. Analyzing what we are experiencing on the internet as human being, we can conclude that world of technology throws everyone based on his personality to where he/she belongs and “these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types”
What is identity? Identity is an unbound formation which is created by racial construction and gender construction within an individual’s society even though it is often seen as a controlled piece of oneself. In Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’, Tatum asserts that identity is formed by “individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts” (Tatum 105). Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’” creates a better understanding of how major obstacles such as racism and sexism shape our self identity.
...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.
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.
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...
There are millions of words across the globe that are used to describe people and uncover their identity, but what is identity? How can you begin to describe something that varies so greatly from one human being to another? Can you create a universal meaning for a word describing human concepts that people often fail to define for themselves? Of course there isn't one definition to define such a word. It is an intricate aspect of human nature, and it has a definition just as complex.
Before the internet, our characteristics such as style, identity, and values were primarily exposed by our materialistic properties which psychologists define as the extended self. But people’s inferences to the idea of online self vs. offline self insisted a translation to these signals into a personality profile. In today’s generation, many of our dear possessions have been demolished. Psychologist Russell W belk suggest that: “until we choose to call them forth, our information, communications, photos, videos, music, and more are now largely invisible and immaterial.” Yet in terms of psychology there is no difference between the meaning of our “online selves” and “offline selves. They both assist us in expressing important parts of our identity to others and provide the key elements of our online reputation. Numerous scientific research has emphasized the mobility of our analogue selves to the online world. The consistent themes to these studies is, even though the internet may have possibly created an escape from everyday life, it is in some ways impersonating
For centuries, humans have used their interaction with one another to help shape outsiders' perceptions of them. Often communication experts refer to this as constructing one’s “social identity.” For many years, this projection of self-came through interpersonal communication; face-to-face communication or other forms of personal interaction. In the progress of technology, this development of one’s personal attributes has come to include photographs, letters, published and unpublished writings, and physical attributes. Many aspects of a person’s “identity” as others see it are difficult and almost impossible to define. In the modern age, such vague characteristics are both helped and hindered by using social media and the internet to “construct”
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...
Peluchette, Joy, and Katherine Karl. "Examining Students’ Intended Image On Facebook: “What Were They Thinking?!”." Journal Of Education For Business 85.1 (2009): 30-37. Academic Search Elite. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.
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.
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...
When joining a social networking site people create a profile, which displays their age, college, hometown, sexual preference, interests, and relationship status; and based on this information the network provides them with suggestions for connections to individuals already on the site. It seems harmless at first; “how does it matter if my friends see where I work or what my interests are, they probably already...