Media and Collective Identity

Facebook and Collective Narcissism

845+ Million Users

1.82 Billion people access the web by phone

1.78 Billion people access via web-connected PCs

The Guardian, Wednesday 14th April 2012

“A focus on Identity requires us to pay closer attentionto the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups”David Buckingham

“Identity is complicated- everybody thinks they’ve got one” David Gauntlett

Representation: the way reality is ‘mediated’ or ‘re-presented’ to us;

Collective Identity: the individual’s sense of belonging to a group (part of personal identity).

What is Collective Identity?

Lots of research has focused on the ways in which people use Social Media Sites (SMS) to construct a presentation or representation of themselves.

Two theorists:

David Buckingham “Youth, Identity and Digital Media”

Zizi Papacharissi “A Networked Self – Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites”

“These network platforms of socially orientated activity permit an introduction of the self via public displays of connection”

“A networked presentation of the self involves performative elements, using a variety of tools and strategies to present tastes, likes, dislikes, affiliations and in general, personality”

“Such a performative palette on sites like Facebook might include listings of interests, posting of comments and responses, and posting and labelling of photographs of one’s self and one’s friends”

Mendelson & Papacharissi

Thoughts on Social Media Sites:

“The manner in which college students portray themselves and tag others through photographs on Facebook is a contemporary means of introducing the self and performing one's identity.”

“College students consciously upload and tag displayed photographs, thus selecting certain subjects and events to emphasise.”

This links with Chalfen's (1987) examination of “how we construct, manipulate, interpret, live with, participate in, and generally use visual symbolic forms.” The constructed nature of identity is particularly interesting for this unit.

This ties in with Roland Barthes and Semiotics: certain visual signs or symbols have a connotative value within Western society. They are understood as possessing symbolic meaning – e.g. the Red rose is symbolic of love; a tear is symbolic of sadness.

This part of the Collective Identity unit will give you the opportunity to examine how visual imagery is employed to present the self and everyday college life via Facebook.

You will study and interrogate the photographs college students present of themselves as important forms of symbolic creation of their worlds.

Let's start with some Facebook facts:

Are you average?

The Profile Picture

Are we missing any 'typical' profile pictures?

Look at your profile picture. What does it say about you?

What about your friends? What is the connotative meaning of their profile picture?

Does their profile picture match their 'real world' identity?

In everyday life, people consciously and unconsciously work to define the way they are perceived, hoping to engender positive impressions of themselves

This effort entails emphasizing certain characteristics, through dress, hairstyle, behaviour, and/or speech, while hiding or diminishing other characteristics perceived as flawed, depending on the context.

Goffman (1959) uses the term “performance” to refer to “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants”.

Contemporary scholars like David Buckingham agree with Goffman that identity is performed; whether or not that performance is virtual or real, offline or online.

Facebook Photos

Personal photographs dominate Facebook. Personal photographs are photographs made by ourselves, members of our family, or peer group for our own use, not by professional photographers and not for mass audiences

We might think that personal photographs would be haphazard: just point and shoot.

Chalfen (1987) and Musello (1980) argue that they are highly ritualized and conventionalized, with a rather limited range of subjects being recorded.

Personal photographs present ideals, emphasizing how we wish our lives to be remembered (Holland, 1987).

According to Roland Barthes we therefore consciously and subconsciously transform ourselves before the camera, portraying a version of ourselves we hope to be (Barthes, 1981).

The positive is always recorded over the negative, with moments of celebration emphasized (King, 1986; Slater, 1995).

“People give a performance when they allow themselves to be photographed, in the sense that they make allowance for a public that will ultimately see the photograph” (Boerdam & Martinius, 1980)

Qualitative Research: Facebook Photographs