FACEBOOK IDENTITIES: CONSTRUCTING VIRTUAL SELVES IN AN ONLINE WORLD A THESIS Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Sociology Colorado College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of the Arts By Erin Rhodes May 2012 On my honor I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this paper. -Erin Rhodes 1 ABSTRACT Each day we make many decisions about how we want to look and act in order to maintain our identity and present ourselves to society in the best possible light. Some individuals rebel against social norms while others follow them to the extreme. Our notions of self are influenced by society and how we desire to be perceived by society. This study focuses on the presentation of self in digital media, specifically on the online social network Facebook. I analyze how individuals construct their Facebook identity and why they present themselves in particular ways. Since users’ identities are known both offline and online by their audience they are unlikely to present a false-self to their “friends.” By interviewing 11 volunteers, I found that participants in this study mainly displayed information about themselves through pictures. Further, participants presented a virtual self through either carefully set privacy settings, not allowing friends to see tagged photos and consciously presenting themselves with certain viewers in mind. Given this, users are omitting information about their real selves in order to appear as their hoped-for self that they can only obtain through their virtual self. By looking at how individuals present themselves on Facebook and their choices about how they do so, we may better understand the relationship between identity and social norms and the significance of self presentation in virtual space and social interaction. 2 I feel like in our modern life, our time together is less and less genuine and our time alone is less and less genuine. Like when you're by yourself, you still like have the possibility of someone texting you now or like on Facebook even though it's not something you have to check, it bothers me that somebody could be trying to talk to me at all times. I think it's really important to have that time like alone to think about what's important to you. So then when you're like with people, you can actually be with people. With Facebook keeping in touch with friends and family has never been easier, but as Ann’s comment reveals, modern technology comes with a cost. Ann understands the need for face-to-face conversation and the importance of being able to disconnect from the internet. Yet she finds that as technology grows, we stop spending genuine time together and instead spend time communicating through these superficial sites or devices. Moreover, communication should not be our only concern, our identity and how we present ourselves on these social sites is also changing. With over 845 million active users Facebook is one of the biggest online social networking sites on the internet today. In one place users can leave messages for friends, post pictures of a recent event, catch up with people’s lives through the News Feed, voice their feelings or thoughts through a status update, and more. It is a place to socialize, catch up, and express oneself. It is a virtual space where social interaction takes place in the form of pictures, status updates and comments from friends. Through Facebook one can maintain a friendship without physically seeing another person. It is a place where people can create a virtual identity and select how they wish to portray themselves that may be different from the real self they present in personal interactions. Until now, an individual constructed their identity with others in a face-to-face context. With Facebook and other online profiles (ie: online dating sites) individuals have 3 a constant self that others can access and view anytime. Viewers can usually access more information about a person through a profile page than one would normally in person. However, impressions about an individual made from information on their Facebook profile may not be entirely correct. Users may be as truthful or dishonest as they want about themselves and viewers may not know the difference. Creating an online identity in this setting, where one will be judged upon what information is on their profile rather than in person creates the ability for individuals to play with identity. Further it allows users to control how others may perceive them and the ability to present themselves in a way that is not true to their real, offline self. This paper shows how Facebook profiles enable individuals to present a virtual, hoped-for self by hiding or omitting certain behaviors captured in pictures, handpicking desirable characteristics, and acting in socially acceptable ways. It is another from of social interaction, where meaning is forged from action and reaction during interaction and judgments are made based on how one presents their self on Facebook. Social norms have developed on Facebook; achieving them is more feasible because users can edit themselves to fit the person they want to become. This is one addictive quality of Facebook that draws individuals to use it as a social tool regardless of weather they are aware of the more negative, time wasting and narcissistic tendencies that come with using Facebook. 4 LITERATURE REVIEW Discovering the Self George H. Mead viewed society as the foundation of resources that allow for human minds to develop and have a “self”. Language facilitates interaction between individuals and, “provides a form of behavior in which the organism or the individual may become an object to himself” (Mead 1934: 284). Through communication and social experiences the self can be realized (Mead 1934). Individuals interact with one another by defining or interpreting each other’s actions. How an individual responds to an action depends on the one has attached to it. Symbols mediate human interaction and the types of symbolic forms of language that allow for communication and the ability to appreciate and realize the “other.” As particular symbols are encountered more and more frequently, the interpretation and rationalization become second nature and individuals begin to process these symbols subconsciously. An individual will eventually be able to anticipate the intentions and expectations of others and see him/herself from not just another’s point of view but from groups of others’. The generalized other represents the common standpoints of those groups. According to Mead’s concept of the “generalized other,” being able to recognize the “other” within society enables role taking of the other, which allows for us to see their perspective of us and turns into self-objectification. By using the others’ perspective individuals are able to reflect and interpret meaning during an interaction. The “generalized other” is defined as an, “organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self” (Mead 1934:289). The individual not only takes the 5 attitudes of the group on his self, but the individual internalizes meanings and alters actions according to the symbol (Mead 1934:289). By acknowledging the other the self can be realized because it is what we see from the others’ perspective. The self includes how one wishes to be perceived by others. There are two parts, the “I” and the “me.” To best understand the difference, consider this sentence: “I want to do this, but what will they think of me?” This phrase comes in many different forms for different people, but the effect is still the same. The “I” is the individual or free agent that is doing the experiencing, thinking and acting (Thoits & Virshup 1997: 108). The “me” is an internalized self that is bound by attitudes, expectations, and assessments of others (Thoits & Virshup 1997: 108). The “they” is the other in which the individual (I/me) is altering themselves to gain social approval (Thoits & Virshup 1997: 108). There is a fine line between the “I” and “me” when it comes to presenting oneself to others. Each side reflects upon the other and depending on the situation, dictates the individual’s actions. Given that individuals perceive their self through other people’s actions and reactions to their self Goffman theorizes that every person is always desperately worried about their image in the eyes of the other. Goffman (1967) described the term “face” as a mask that changes depending on the audience and variety of social interaction. Additionally it is self-defined in terms of approved social attributes. Face work is the work that an individual does to maintain “face” or the way one presents his or her self to others. Goffman describes the face, “as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social 6 attributes” (Goffman 1959: 213). For example, one may act differently around one’s parents or in church than they do around their friends or at a birthday party because social expectations are different for each role that they fulfill. Another symbolic interactionist Charles Cooley, most well known for his theory of the “looking glass self,” relates perceptions to feelings. The “looking glass self” is based on three elements, “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification” (Cooley 1922: 185). Thus, when an individual receives negative or condescending responses to their appearance from a variety of persons they socialize with, they may begin to view themselves as less physically attractive or appealing.