your online identity: now playing on computers near you
Try to remember a time you watched a movie or play that was really confusing, yet you still tried to interpret it until it was over. Well this scenario more or less is what other people go through when trying to interpret your social media. Sociologist Erving Goffman compared human online identities to theatre performances, where the “individual (the performer) sends social cues that are inferred and interpreted by an audience of observers who help shape the notion of the said individual’s identity.” While this is true for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, it is especially emphasized through dating websites and apps like Tinder.
Turkle agrees with Goffman that our online identities are ever-changing and always being evaluated. She adds, “the practice of producing multiple online personae is sympotomatic of the inherent flux of human identity performance… we should think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized multiplicities, flexible and ever in process.” These “multiple online personae” Turkle is talking about can be relatable to all social media users. For example, you have a Facebook. In a week, you posted two pictures of things you did that week: one of you at a party, and another of you helping at an old-folk home. Some people may have only seen one of these pictures on their newsfeed, and therefore have one of two perceptions of you: that you are partying it up in college, or that you are a kindhearted and helpful person. Because of situations like this, we can understand that our audience contributes to the “resultant product and perception of [our own] identity.” The more pictures you add, the more peoples' ideas of you change.
Furthermore, Lisa Nakamura, a professor at University of Michigan, coined the term “identity tourists,” describing the “phenomenon of new media users constructing varied personae.” Similar to Goffman and Turkle’s arguments above, we can see a pattern that people struggle with keeping a consistent identity online. Dating media theorist Katie Davis confirms that our online profiles, “often are not exact reproductions of offline identity.” And as David Buckingham puts it, “it is difficult both cognitively and metacognitively to monitor all of one’s different selves and audiences.” This goes for all users of social media. Keeping track of even your own online identity can be difficult, especially when you don’t keep your imagined audience in mind. Our performative process online is ever-changing and dependent on many variables, and therefore can be interpreted differently by every person viewing your profile.
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Borrow, B. (2014, August 6). More Than Just a Pretty Profile: Exploring the social norms and technical affordances that shape and mediate identity performance on Tinder. Retrieved October 26, 2014.










