Online Identity

danah boyd’s first few sections of her book were actually quite informative and caused me to do some critical thinking and re examine some of my past experiences on social media. One of the early topics she discussed during her introduction was that after talking to some modern day teens danah realized that nothing much had changed from high school back in her day: the gossip, peer pressure, group interaction, and the myriad of other intricacies associated with 14-18 year olds was all still around. The only difference was that it had simply switched platforms from front porch stoops, drive in theaters, and malls to social media as the place for teens to congregate and express themselves. I had not thought too much about this trend in teenagers; to me it was simply the thing to be doing-social media has always been there and so I don’t know anything different. As I read further into the introduction I began to see where danah boyd was going and began to draw lines between what teenagers did in the past and what we are doing now, and I came upon the same conclusion as danah that I mentioned earlier: teens will always be teens. My peer group and I used social media basically how danah described it in her book; we use it to connect with friends we already know so that we can talk, gossip, and share about things going on in our lives since we have limited time to do so person to person. I also found the point she brought up about how we teens create online identities which are not really “identities” per se but rather extensions of ourselves into the internet to be fascinating and it caused some in depth analyzation of my own social media “identity”. What I found after looking over my different accounts actually supported most of danah’s claims. I did not create an artificial identity on any of my accounts, but I did select what part of myself I wanted to show on each social media platform. On Facebook it was just pictures of me at events such as prom or on vacations along with the occasional couple month status update- nothing too revealing or serious, just general information about me. Instagram was like Facebook except it was more revealing of the activities I did, people I hung out with, and places I went on a more frequent basis. Finally Snapchat was just full on me since I can post anything I want on there without fearing the repercussions too much since I feel as if I have the most control over who sees what I do on it. So I noticed a correlation between the level of freedom and self expression as I moved from social medias that I did not have as much control over to ones that I did have control over, which I believe supports some of what danah was trying to get across.

The topic of collapses also interested me during my readings. I personally have never had to deal with one since I keep most of my social medias separate, and I do not use Facebook that often which seems to be the main culprit behind many of these collapses due to the immense interconnectivity that it provides, but the situations that arose because of identity construction on social medias piqued my interest as it never occurred to me that those situations could arise so easily. Regarding the issues and collapses that could occur as identity construction intersects with Instagram and Pinterest I believe that there really should not be that many problems. For one the article gave me the most info on Pinterest I have received other than knowing it was a site to post stuff you liked and wanted to buy. Judging from my previous information on Pinterest and the info supplied by the article I do not see how identity construction plays a role on this site, although it could be possible I just simply don’t have enough experience on the platform to form a solid opinion. Instagram on the other hand I do see as possibly bringing up some issues with identity construction since it is the most used social media and most of the users are teens, my peers. But just like I stated in this blog post and my previous one it is not that hard to keep your Instagram account from being viewed by anyone that you don’t want to. There is a simple privacy setting, it is easy to untag yourself, and Instagram is usually reserved for more “classy” edited pictures not ones that can jeopardize a future career or school opportunity. In fact many of my friends have two instagram accounts: a “real” one and a “secret” one. The real one is used for public viewing and generally does not contain any scandalous pictures or the like, and the secret one is where they are on private and only friends with people they are close to and so they are able to post more freely. By doing so, even though it requires a little more management, having two accounts allows my peers to enjoy Instagram to its fullest without having to worry about putting the wrong “image” out there.