This book is about people, including you – all of you, through whom culture passes and takes new shape. You are a huge part of social media – but factors come together to make you, you? Identity is an iteration of the self that links individuals with how they are perceived by others. Identity combines how you see yourself and how others see you, in an endless riff that becomes your positioning in the world.
Section 1: Creating a profile
And now compare your student and professional profile to the profile you might use in online dating. Is it different? I imagine so! Perhaps the focus moves to looking attractive and inviting to attract those you are interested in.
Student Insights: Observing social media as a placeholder (audio by Bella Villalpando, Spring 2021)
Respond to this case study: This student speaks about watching someone else curating their online profile, and interprets those actions to infer things about that person’s life. Can the way someone uses online platforms tell us real information about their offline life? What are some examples from your life that could be seen by others as not being the “real” you?
You may find your self-presentation of your identity is limited or enhanced by what options or features the platform you use offers. These are affordances: cues in an environment that communicate how to interact with features or things in that environment and that can also communicate to others. A button affords being pushed; Snapchat’s snap streaks affords keeping a visible running count of two people’s interactions with one another. Affordances can also be expanded, as they often are by users on social media platforms. For example, many platforms that do not afford the claiming of gender identities other than male or female find users exploiting creative ways to express gender fluidity.
Another example of identity limitations online—and in offline systems relying on categorization—relates to race and ethnicity, which are related but distinct concepts. Race is the visible perception of whiteness, blackness, Latinidad, or other categorization related to people’s characteristics such as skin color, while ethnicity refers to shared cultural expression or history, potentially including elements like religion or language. The racial and ethnic identities of many online media users and particularly those in the US can be complex combinations of races and cultures that are inadequately reflected in categorization systems.
The decisions and challenges users face in creating online identities get even more complex when it’s time to post content. Of course, users of social media are not always seeking to express their most “realistic” selves. Some platforms are desirable to users because they afford fantasy filters or the trappings of other identities. Video game avatars offer compelling examples of profiles that embody other lives and beings. But does that mean you don’t spend much time designing that avatar, since it’s “not you?” Of course not; it has become standard in the gaming industry to charge significant sums for downloadable content to customize your avatar or “skin” – because your avatar is you, for one or more gaming publics. And that avatar and profile will influence how people treat you in-game; they constitute your in-game identity.
Identities online are associate with financial capital and social power, demonstrated most clearly by influencers —online celebrities and microcelebrities whose popularity is leveraged to sway the opinions, preferences, and purchasing decisions of their audience. Meanwhile, online audiences seem to crave the sense of “real”-ness, or authenticity, from online influencers and personal contacts alike, associating that quality with trust and closeness. As of 2023, the rising app BeReal was designed around one daily invitation to users to capture what they are doing during two-minute window, in a clear attempt to capture authentic moments. This design may not be built around simply wanting users to enjoy one another; authentic moments are big business to those who buy and sell user data. The pressure to be authentic can be particularly complicated for people of color, who can be challenged with meeting expectations online of what Mikaela Pitcan and coauthors refer to as a “vanilla self:” exhibiting the trappings of conservative whiteness, while simultaneously appearing to be authentically part of their racial group. This identity conundrum is not new—Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu found pressure to “act white” existed for black students in the 1980s, well before social networking sites existed—but social media’s capacity to gather varieties of audiences means different expectations of how to behave “right” can all come together at once.
Section 2: Who are you? Offline? Online? Across modalities?
Like the concept of information, identity is a notion that used to be amorphous and philosophical. You couldn’t easily set “identity” apart from the human to whom the identity belonged. Today, though, humans try to project every unseen aspect of our lives onto the binary-minded digital world. And that means the formerly shapeless concept of identity has to take shape and if we want it to represent us online, we have to know what we want and put it out there.
As a human, you don’t just have one identity, or even one online identity and also one offline identity. Our legal world and policies from platforms like Facebook may limit people to having one identity, but in life, both online and offline, we play many roles and thus have many identities.
Student Insights: The Snap Map Scandal (audio by Ally Hendricks, Fall 2021)
Respond to this case study: What people and contexts did the student seem to have in mind and not have in mind when they set up the Snap Map? How did the Snap Map collapse these contexts?
Section 3: Self-presentation, Performativity, and Intersectionality
Two theorists have given us important tools to understand these identity roles, although both theorists began writing about these roles before the internet drew so many of us to craft identities online.
Backtrack to the 1950s. Social roles in North America were rigid. Then, sociologist Erving Goffman put forward a new way of looking at identity in his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman wrote that we are all actors on a “social stage,” who play particular roles to create our identities and that these roles change as we interact with different people and situations. He also wrote that we can only really understand ourselves when we look at all of the roles we play.
The cultural critic and feminist theorist Judith Butler deconstructed the behaviors of identity roles expressing to gender in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. Butler’s theories introduced the notion that gender itself is our playing of roles like “boy,” “girl,” “man,” and “woman,” rather than these being “natural” or connected to our biologies. Butler’s concept of performativity says that roles like gender are only constructed through our performances of them; they would not exist without our acting them into existence.
Also beginning in the later 1980s and early 90s, civil rights theorist, activist, and law professor Kimberle Crenshaw wrote about how the power dynamics related to gender, race, and other identity categorizations must be understood for how they intersect with one another. Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality has been crucial both as a tool in holistic identity presentation and in recognizing that racism, sexism, and other types of oppression do not take terms impacting people, but instead work in compound ways.
If these theories have truth in them – and I believe they do – what does this mean for our identities online? Well, our online identities offer some additional evidence that gender and other social roles are constructed. Many early internet adopters were thrilled at the possibilities of expressing themselves without being defined by their bodies. But what we have learned from the maturing of the internet – aided by Goffman’s and Butler’s theories – is that humans’ “selves” have never existed only in or on our bodies. We perform ourselves into existence. And so when we perform ourselves into being online, we carry much of that same old offline, embodied baggage with us.