Social Media: The Practices of Identity and Digital Exploitation
How is Social Media Affecting Our Identity?
Digital media has given us the freedom to efficiently share whatever we are able to create with the rest of the world at the touch of a button (Lindgren, 2017, p. 60). As media researcher James Curran (2012, p. 3) puts it: “the internet would be an unstoppable force […] but today, many people […] have become increasingly skeptical and pessimistic about the effects of the internet society (Lindgren, 2017, p. 47). “‘Technology is neither good nor bad’ […] ‘nor is it neutral’” (Lindgren, 2017, p. 290) but as individuals living in the twenty-first century, we should concern ourselves with how social media is affecting our identity within a psychological, emotional and physical domain.
In the 21st century, social media has emerged as a game-changer within the communications domain. What we see, read and hear on social media has become a fundamental platform for many individuals all over the world where people can share their own content — they become content creators. Social media has become important for many people worldwide, from communicating and interacting with others, to sharing personal stories or images, etc.
It is also important to note that “social media influences are complex” (Perloff, 1999, p. 366) and that it is not a one size fits all situation but it is solely based on the person as an individual. As Valkenburg and Peter (2013) helpfully observe, “only by formulating a clear hypothesis about which individuals are particularly susceptible to the effects of media are we able to specify the boundary conditions for media effects” (as cited in Perloff, 2014, p. 367).
“Our ‘identity’ is […] a patchwork of identities, a complicated set of similarities and differences in relation to other people” (Gripsrud J., 2010, p. 7). Identity can be distinguished in two main types: personal identity and social or collective identity. “Our social identity is, at the outset, the identity we get by way of other people’s perceptions of us and the collective contexts we are part of” (Gripsrud J., 2010, p. 7). On the other hand, our personal identity “is what we might suggest as an answer when we ask ourselves, ‘Who am I?’” (Gripsrud J., 2010, p. 7). It is the part of ourselves as individuals, “what is unique about ourselves, what makes our own experiences, emotions and moods special and not necessarily easy to share with others” (Gripsrud J., 2010, p. 7).
The journey towards forming one’s own personal identity is never easy and it has possibly become harder in the world we are living in today, where we are susceptible to a world of information overload due to the technological access we have 24/7. Nevertheless, technology and social media platforms have become an integral part of our daily lives and we cannot live without them. However, is social media affecting us in ways we cannot understand?
According to Goffman, “individuals develop a sense of self from creating an impression they wish to give to others” (Manago et al., 2008). Whilst nature and nurture both play a role in how our identity is shaped, social media and our exposure to it is a new addition in itself to this process. The content we expose ourselves to online changes the way we think about ourselves and others. Therefore, the consequence that we are facing as individuals within the social media platform is the increased online interaction time that is overtaking in the formation of our identity and understanding of ourselves which are now affecting us to a greater degree through the popularity or feedback on certain aspects of the user’s life that they are willing to share.
Living in this modern age we cannot deny the fact that we have become one with technology and the way we use it in our daily lives. We construct the technology but technology also constructs us. By the way we have been influenced by it, we have become what technology has allowed us to become in the way we construct the world around us and the way we think about the world. Through the use of technology especially through the use of social media, we enable ourselves to create a certain identity and that is due to the fact that we have embedded ourselves in this virtual world the human brain has been able to create. We have become embedded in our technology and in turn technology and social media have created for us a platform in which we can shape our identity within a two-way or multi-way dimension. We either choose the way we want to be seen and create our own identity or we are influenced by social media and other people’s identities, therefore we create that identity based on what we see due to the influence we have by others in wanting to be part of the herd.
Social Media and Identity Formation
When it comes to social media and identity formation, we need to understand one important factor — the interaction the individual has with social media and how he/she decides to use it. Therefore, we can also associate that online identity formation can vary depending on an individual’s personality. An online user may feel the need to project and create an idea about themselves to other people online so others can see them how they really want to be seen. This can also be an open window where an individual suffers from low self-esteem, physically feels unattractive, is insecure, etc. Social media can empower them to create the identity they crave due to filters and other technological tools provided. They get to have the attention they seek in the real world but cannot obtain so they create their own identity, the person who they dream to be and are therefore seen and get that kind of attention on social media. Nonetheless, in the long run, this can be psychologically and emotionally damaging to the individual in real life because they are distorting their own true selves and creating a fake persona which in turn within the virtual world makes their true selves invisible.
These kinds of individuals can end up losing themselves in real life for an identity they created online, whereas, in the end, it does not exist apart from their own minds and the projection they give to others on that social media platform. That identity only exists within a bubble but outside of it, there is the real world, real life where one has to live on an everyday basis. The concluding factor here is not about saying what is right or wrong because many people need that escape, to be someone who they want to be outside their own reality because it empowers them and gives them a moment of freedom that is created by their own free will. Alternatively, there are many people who are their real selves both online and in the real world. They are their true selves because they are content with who they are, so they are not influenced by others but have their own identity which they like to maintain. We cannot deny though that online we always portray the best version of ourselves and that is a choice we all get to make in the virtual world.
Davis (2012) argues that social networking sites provide means of self-expression for users but having these outlets of expression, this in turn creates an issue of balancing multiple selves and their respective audiences. What social media provides to a human being as an individual is that it creates freedom of expression where the online user feels liberated to express himself/herself online however they want. Social media gives us the freedom for self-expression, thus it gives us the chance to work through certain obstacles that we might be dealing with in our own reality. Social media enables us to make changes to ourselves and create an identity online that we would not necessarily make offline due to self-esteem issues or certain types of roles we need to maintain in real life for example. Online we can be as close to our own selves or far from our own true identity as much as we want. In her article, Davis argues though that certain kinds of users may forget who they are trying to be online which in turn may lead to feelings of being unauthentic and can possibly cause emotional and psychological damage to the individual. What Davis’s article portrays is that the use of social media allows us to test a variety of forms regarding our online selves and the identity we choose to create depending on what social media platform we are using and based on the feedback given from the audience of that particular user, it is then incorporated to create a new identity and thus understanding who the user has to become. Through the use of social media, we have control over our identity formation and self-understanding, therefore we can choose how to present ourselves offline based on the feedback of our online tested identity.
Social media enables identity expression, exploration, and experimentation. It gives us the freedom to be our own content creator. Contrarily, we are living in a world where nowadays we think that we know way too much about other people’s lives based on their social media platform. This necessarily may not be a true statement not only because on social media we only get a glimpse of a person’s life by the photos and videos we get to share, but also the identity we portray of ourselves online may be totally different from who we are and how we act in real life. In turn, this may shift onto us as individual beings behind the screen. We get to see the perfect image of people regarding what they decide to share online as content creators, and we are emotionally and psychologically triggered to want to be like them. On the other hand, this may lead to an emotional and psychological manifestation of ourselves, on our own identity because we want to be seen like them by others. Social media gives us the freedom to create how we want to be seen online, it may empower us momentarily in the virtual world, but it can also break our own identity in the real world where we can start to forget who are as individuals, what makes us unique because we are so immersed within the identity we create in virtual reality that we become part of the many instead of being our own unique selves. We start thinking about our sense of self in relation to what other people portray, therefore living in this constant bubble of social media is changing the way people’s identity is being formed. In this age, we are constantly consuming so much information about other people’s lives that our identity has becomes entangled to who others are and what others are doing, that our identity has become a function of reacting to glimpses of information we get to see.
Social Media and Identity: Influence on Young Adults and Branding
The most vulnerable individuals that succumb to social media and are highly influenced and affected by it are young adults. Social media offers numerous interpretations of what is attractive, beautiful, appropriate and young people especially are vulnerable when it comes to physical appearance. Social media in today’s world is all about the visual and we are bombarded every single day about how we should look and act. This, in turn, affects our identity in wanting to be part of the mass, to be seen, to be accepted.
Manago et al. (2008) emphasize that one’s adolescent years are a critical time for identity formation. Young adults (those who are between 18 and early 20’s) rely on social interactions to figure out who they are. This usually occurred with reality but with the emergence of social media, this process has moved to virtual reality, thus increasing identity formation to a whole new level because of the massive amount of information that young adults are bombarded with due to social media and the internet. As a consequence, young adults as individuals may be tempted to construct a false self-presentation in order to fit in. Therefore, this kind of self is built on the false representations that are offered by social media of what is appealing, tempting, and accepted. Therefore, the individual may reject his/her own identity in order to create a false persona that in turn is accepted by others. The concluding factor is that virtual reality does in fact shape how we view ourselves, our relationship with others, and the worlds that surround us: the real world and the virtual world.
Social media can also affect our identity when it comes to wanting to brand ourselves in the virtual world to make a profit out of our own image, the persona that we create that makes us stand out from the rest and be seen by the audience on a whole new level. What we are talking about here is the individual not only being his/her own content creator but also a producer with an aim to make a profit from his/her audience which in turn makes them the consumers. One social media platform that is the perfect example is Instagram. Instagram provides freedom for self-exploration where an individual is free to create his/her own identity. These are the kind of people who want to make their face and body as a brand where their image is their own unique branding. The unique identity they create makes them stand out from the crowd, thus gaining millions of followers. The content creator is the producer and the audience is the consumer from which the producer benefits financially. This is the power that social media can have when one is able to create their own unique identity whether it is a real or a false image of the person. The freedom that social media gives them is that they are in control of what they want to create, how they want to be seen by their audience. They are the producers. This, therefore, makes us interested in their branding and we not only become the audience but we become the consumers. Thus, people are constructing their own identity within the producer and consumer paradigm.
We are living in an era where social media has become an integral part of our lives. We no longer live one life but now we are living a dual life: reality and virtual reality. Our virtual identity has become integrated with our real-life identity and social media is the core basis of it all. We live in two diverse worlds separated by one another but at the same time intertwined. We as individuals are the ones who intertwine them. What social media has that real-life lacks is the creation of perfection and the freedom of expression to create our own unique selves with no boundaries that hold us in real life. Social media enables us to create our perfect ideal selves, whoever we decide to be both from outside through the use of filters and also when interacting and communicating with other people. For example, it enables us to be more open with other people via texting because we can choose not to see the other person so it makes us more comfortable to interact with others instead of real-life situations where we interact with other people face to face. This is a psychological and emotional manifestation of social media’s power that can affect our identity. In real life, we can create a facade but social media lets us construct the facade we want not only from the inside but also from the outside. However, social media’s impact on affecting our identity may be self-destructive too because we start changing the way we look, the way we present ourselves, the way we view ourselves, and the way we want others to perceive us, which in turn we might lose our real selves in the process, our own persona in everyday life.
This kind of manifestation creates certain questions we can all think about. Should our virtual identity be separate from our real-life identity or should we have the same identity online and offline? Are we the same person or we project different aspects of ourselves depending on the social media platform we are using? Does social media create a conflict between the me and I? Why do some people decide to be themselves in both worlds and others decide to change their identity?
Online we have the power to create identities that are multiple, complex and interrelated. What kinds of identities are we performing that technology is enabling and restricting us from performing on any social media platform be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.? Do we have a separate identity for each social media platform we use? Do we take diverse roles in presenting who we are on each social media platform whereas on one social media platform we are closer in projecting our real selves and on another social media platform our identity is shaped by that social media sphere which takes us far away from who we really are in real life?
Book References:
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life. Anchor, Doubleday Publishing, NY.
Gripsrud, J. (2010). Understanding Media Culture. Published by Bloomsbury Academy.The Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model.
Lingren, S. (2017). Digital Media and Society. SAGE Publishings.
Article References:
Ganda M. (2014). Social Media and Self: Influences on the Formation of Identity and Understanding of Self through Social Networking Sites, University Honors Theses. Paper 55. https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.64
Manago et al. (2008, August 15). Self-presentation and gender on MySpace, Volume 29, Issue 6, November–December 2008, Pages 446–458 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2008.07.001
Patti M. Valkenburg, Jochen Peter (2013, March 7). Journal of Communication, Volume 63, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 221– 243 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12024
Perloff, R. M. (2014, May 29). Social Media Effects on Young Women’s Body Image Concerns: Theoretical Perspectives and an Agenda for Research. Sex Roles (71), 363–377. DOI 10.1007/s11199–014–0384–6A
Ugur Gunduz (2017, September). The Effect of Social Media on Identity Construction.
Zhao Pan et al. Who Do You Think You Are? Common and Differential Effects of Social Self-Identity on Social Media Usage https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2017.1296747
This blog is a project for Study Unit MCS5460, University of Malta.
