Literature Review

Social media is a large part of our society today, making it one of he fastest growing outlets that people have at their disposal to share content with others around the world. Though there is a catch, with sharing this content there are many issues that come from it. These issues ranging from overproduction in marketing, addiction to these platforms, and the overwhelming shift of face-to-face conversations moving to texts seen on screens. These issues stem from problems that were unseen at the creation of social media, one being the process of identity work/performance. This process or theory of how we define ourselves through our cultural performances has been around since the beginning of mankind but what is making this a problem is the way social media has molded this theory, the representation of identity online stated by Lee Humphreys in The Qualified Self in part has led to most of these problems. The problem of how identity work/performance is made on social media has become a very pressing matter especially in young adults the primary users of these social media platforms. If left unchecked this mediation of traces creating representation of identity can lead to some very negative side effects that people find on social media today, things like identity crisis leading to suicide or scamming of users by misleading accounts. How a person is represented online is an important theme to understand if one is to be one social media in today’s society without it these negative outcomes will just continue to grow if not treated and acknowledged by users. Approaching this problem from a data driven study of posts and textual transcription of interviews and giving a better explanation for this theory to users is the best way to combat this problem at this given moment in time. In a world filled with fake news and other online phenomenon plaguing social media timelines, one can get lost in a constant influx of ideas and content without proper guidance and data driven research. Through the use of online traces of posts and photos this data can then be categorized into possible representations the user is going for and later determine with a deeper analysis through answers given about the representations shown from the mediation of their profile and prior posts. To understand this approach further here are the sources used to determine this approach as being the one with the highest chance of successfully applying and understanding the idea of identity work/performance online. These sources include the The Qualified Self, Stand out of Our Light, Why Our Screens make us Less Happy, Fandom Identity/Fandom as Identity, We Need to Talk About This Unhealthy Social Media Behavior, Who Are You Online, What is ‘Catfishing’, and YOUR INSTAGRAM IDENTITY. All sources having one thing in common and that is the theory of identity work being an important factor online and through the sources information brings us to the research and data already collected in my given project.

            The best way to start understanding the magnitude of the given problem with identity work, George Herbert Mead’s theory of the “I” and “me” has to come first in explaining the meaning of identity in the first place both online and offline. “The "Me" is what is learned in interaction with others and (more generally) with the environment: other people's attitudes, once internalized in the self, constitute the Me” (“I” and the “me”, 2018). The “Me” is the overall identity created for us by our peers while the “I” is the opposite. “The "I" acts creatively, though within the context of the me. Mead notes that "It is only after we have acted that we know what we have done...what we have said” (“I” and the “me”, 2018). These two pieces of Mead’s theory are what shape the foundation of the identity work/performance found being represented by traces and mediation online arguing the point that just as we are judged by our peers in society face-to-face we are also judged by the opinions of our peers via our photos and posts representing us a certain way online giving us a certain “me” online. Social media is the definition of Meads theory where the “I” is the posts and photos we get to chose all the time to share on a users account and the “me” being the opinions we get from the likes and comments one gets from sharing that content with them. This analysis of George Herbert Mead’s theory allowed for Lee Humprhey’s to piggyback off it where she states that “When people perform their identities through media accounting, they create representations. The media traces they write or create become texts which can be read by themselves and others” (Humphreys, pg. 104). Representations as Lee Humphrey theorizes are what make up the same “me” we find in our social world just in a different manner created via mediation of traces created by old posts and photos. This theory is the backbone of the research I have been doing on linkedin, facebook, and twitter. Every participant with each site has shown different identities depending on their use of the sites, breaking down the same theory Lee Humphreys was trying to incorporate into what it means to be online. This is furthered by the definition of what it means to be online in our social world by James Williams talking about his own personal run in with what it means to identify oneself on social media talking about the push to pursue social validations.

“In my own life I saw this pettiness, this imprudence, manifesting in the way the social comparison dynamics of social media platforms had trained me to prioritize mere “likes” or “favorites,” or to get as many “friends” or “connections” as possible, over pursuing other more meaningful relational aims. These dynamics had made me more competitive for other people’s attention and affirmation than I ever remember being: I found myself spending more and more time trying to come up with clever things to say in my social posts, not because I felt they were things worth saying but because I had come to value these attentional signals for their own sake. Social interaction had become a numbers game for me, and I was focused on “winning” – even though I had no idea what winning looked like. I just knew that the more of these rewarding little social validations I got, the more of them I wanted. I was hooked” (Williams, pg. 109).

Although showing that pettiness and imprudence are a large part of social media now, he also proves a point by showing that our representation we make of ourselves online is following the same idea of the “me” stated by Mead’s theory that we want to seek that given approval and opinions of our peers even if it takes away from the “I” at times. This quote gives deeper meaning to why identity work/performance is an important subject to study. Keeping this thought provoking movement found on social media virtually made up the approach determining that the “me” plays a large part in the representation process of traces of users building the categories that would eventually place the participants in their own placement through their own representations of themselves through sharing posts and photos. Understanding this shift from the “I” in social media to the “me” is a vital piece to my research in that it shows what identity is now but also what it was before. It is important to follow the trend and shift to a split reality online through separating identities via different representations of oneself offline and online. Alexandra Samuel in her Ted Talk approaching this new movement with this quote that,

“My very first reason you can stop apologizing for your life online which is this idea that when you go online when you say I’m not Alex today I’m a W Samuel that you’re somehow hiding your self that when you’re online you’re using a pseudonym or a username or an avatar or maybe even anonymous that somehow you’re doing that because you’re hiding well nothing could be further from the truth in fact I would argue that when you’re online you are often more real more authentic than you might be offline” (TEDxVictoria, 2012)

Although the way we use these sites have changed to social validation of our followers online, the idea behind what we post online representing who we are is still the same. We might be posting things that are not necessarily ours for example like the source What is ‘Catfishing’, but we are the same person we are in the real world just mediated more by what we say and do online than in the real world due to the textual traces we leave behind. Although there are some issues with identity being represented online, in the form of fake representation. Some might say it roots out any possibility of representation of identity work being a possible theory or an important one due to the many ways someone can represent themselves in a way that does not represent themselves in society.

Though to crush any opposition to my research and the theory of representation in identity work, the definition of catfishing is needed. ““Catfishing’ refers to a scam where someone, the ‘catfish, creates a fictitious online identity and seeks out online relationships” (What is ‘Catfishing’, 2018). Although catfishing can be seen by some as a way to get around representation of identity work/performance, these catfishers fall under the same identity performance found in the real world such as people identifying themselves as scammers or bullies, these users are still performing the same identities just in this case online. Though this can be debunked with the help of Adam Alter’s Ted talk where he states the amount of time we consume now with social media, making a simple prognosis like catfishing appear in the scheme of the identity representation online. Breaking down the overall day of a person Adam Alter makes a good point that we spend more time online in our personal time than ever before. “We sleep roughly seven- and –a- half to eight hours a day” (Alter, 2017). Then adding in work, “We work eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. We engage in survival activities’ – these are things like eating and bathing and looking after kids—about three hours a day” (Alter, 2017). That leaves at most three hours of personal time which is an important time slot due to it dealing with us expressing ourselves whether that be doing something offline or online, which we usually are online. “What’s interesting about these—dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing—people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these” (Alter, 2017).  If you multiple all six by twenty seven and divide by sixty minutes, you virtually get 3 hours (2.7). That is almost all of our free time meaning if we can not express ourselves and our identity offline then being a human we express our identities online making representation of identity work/performance and my research on it that much more important to clarify the complex way we want our image and the image our peers make for us now online.

            Applying this to situations and problems outside social media or that stem from social media, my research and the theory being followed can shed some light on serious matters in society. These include young adults and teenagers dealing with suicide, and interests. All of these matters depend on the subject of identity work and the representations made online, costing some their lives, and others their chance to do what they love. Through the use of the prior sources and argument of how important identity through representation is and how much time we consume on our social media accounts with it taking most of our personal time up, it shows how important it is to apply this to these matters of the image you make for yourself online and the interests you share with others. Finding a happy medium in both of these is needed. Seen in Harnish and Davis’ article on unhealthy social media behavior it helps give a better example to set forward when there is too much representation of identity being made online that it becomes negative to the user of the account. A count in the article that sums it up nicely is by a doctor Jill Walsh saying, “It is definitely changing how we grow up and figuring out who you are. Teens are always having to manage the highlights reel of their life. That’s really hard because they’re trying to think about audiences they don’t even know” (Harnish & Davis, 2017). This outside of the research and theory is the outlier of the identity work and representation trying to be made online of sorts that is the best way to describe this idea because it is not the intentions of the theory to do this but in special situations the “me” can override the “I” and become so influenced that it becomes toxic to the person online. This application is the negative spectrum of the theory with the interest application being the positive side where identity can be broken into parts of culture and represent it in that manner like Fandom in Keidra Chaney’s article. Quoting her stating that, “ Fan culture can be more than just a community, it’s also identity, a tribe of sorts and often those identities are connected to cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, class distinctions and presumptions” (Chaney, 2015). Keidra Chaney shows the amazing splits representation can go into to formulate ones identity online by sharing the groups and things they enjoy doing. These two pieces of representation shows how dynamic identity work/performance via representation has come and where it will go in the future with growing methods of research to follow such as categorization of posts through groups, interests, and sharing with friends to the smallest of things like comments and likes on posts showing both positive and negative sides, giving my research project a lot of data a categories each of my participants could fall into making for interesting finds to follow like what they do, their interests, and their character towards others, to even the most minute things like being extroverted or introverted online. This theory is by far the most important when it comes to understanding how social media works and operates for a given user as well as users.

Work Cited

“'I' And the 'Me'.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 July 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'I'_and_the_'me'.

Alter, Adam. “Why Our Screens Make Us Less Happy.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, www.ted.com/talks/adam_alter_why_our_screens_make_us_less_happy/up-next#t-18350.

Keidra, et al. “Fandom and Identity/Fandom as Identity.” The Learned Fangirl, 20 Oct. 2015, thelearnedfangirl.com/2013/08/fandom-and-identityfandom-as-identity/.

Harnish, Amelia, and Ariel Davis. “We Need To Talk About This Unhealthy Social Media Behavior.” Transgender Experience Awkward Ted Talk Jackson Bird, Refinery29, www.refinery29.com/2017/03/146733/identity-crisis-causes-social-media-fake-world ….

Humphreys, Lee. The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life. The MIT Press, 2018.

Samuel, Alexandra. “Who Are You Online? A 360-Degree View.” Harvard Business Review, 23 July 2014, hbr.org/2012/01/who-are-you-online-a-360-degre.html.

TEDxTalks. “TEDxVictoria - Alexandra Samuel: Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life.” YouTube, YouTube, 6 Jan. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ui2ZwO-efo0#at=29.

“What Is 'Catfishing'?” Findlaw, consumer.findlaw.com/online-scams/what-is-catfishing.html.

Williams, James. Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018.