Thesis Title: Subtitle

A Case For the ‘Authentic’ Self?

Facebook as a technology encourages users to represent the totality of their person, as opposed to an avatar of it. Facebook encourages me disclose all there is to know about me: my family; my friends; my history; where I work; where I have worked; where I went to high school and University (and when), as well as where I go, who I’m with, what I like, my relationship status, my phone number, address and other sundry important life events. To fully and honestly opt in to Facebook’s architecture, does not really allow for the selective presentation of an identity. At the time of writing Facebook has redoubled efforts to ensure that Facebook profiles are linked to locatable offline persons by deactivating the accounts of drag queens that were using their stage names on Facebook (Farrington 2014).

The inclusion of diverse and wide ranging pieces of personal information means that the totality of a Facebook profile is to represent a self, not an identity. The self presented on Facebook is not free-floating, but linked to mainstream institutions such as work and educational institutions that limit the flexibility of the self presented on Facebook.

For the adult participants in this research, their understanding of Facebook was much more instrumental and practical than other research has indicated. The performance of self on Facebook was more a part of the incidental self-presentation that is part of daily life, as opposed to a separate and deliberative act. While self-presentation occurs on Facebook, as it does in all situations, participants did not consciously conceive their interactions on Facebook to be part of a conscious performance of the self. Instead, they took care to use Facebook in way that did not appear to be conscious self-presentation. Photos focused outwards, on experiences and events, as opposed to photos of the user. Posts presented little information that could be explicitly read for clues about the self.

Participants continually emphasised that posts should be useful, interesting and free of any intimate personal details. This demonstrates in Goffman’s terms that they prefer to rely on what is ‘given off’ rather than what is ‘given’ when presenting the self on Facebook. The picture presented on Facebook is uniformly sunny, interesting or funny; positive life events
are shared and celebrated, and the self as presented on Facebook is largely free from pain, trauma, and disappointment. Transgressions of this are rare and are somewhat disruptive and are generally met with reserved or limited responses. This further serves to reinforce the type of space Facebook is as it reinforces Facebook’s status as a parochial realm in which private troubles are rarely represented in full view of others. These intimacies, participants indicate, are held over for face-to-face conversations or other more private spheres.

One of the reasons for this may be that Facebook feels more corporeal than other forms of CMC as it is inextricably linked to offline networks and relationships. The fact that what participants do on Facebook is linked to a body that is locatable in time and space, means that boundless identity presentation is limited as these claims are able to be easily falsified. The direct link between the offline self and ones online self-presentation is largely shaped by Facebook’s architecture and affordances. From the beginning Facebook was linked to offline institution such as universities, which functioned as a way of verifying or locating one’s identity within these structures. Facebook has also become a very visual medium with a strong emphasis on photos to convey information. Additionally, Facebook displays geographical information about where a status has been posted from and also enables users to ‘check in’ at certain locations. These factors mean there is less creativity available to playfully construct the self online. The presentation of self is limited by Facebook’s links to the offline environment, temporally, geographically and relationally.

The presentation of the self, thus constrained, is grounded in embodied circumstances even though it may occur in a disembodied space.