The Presentation of Self Online

I'd like to take a moment to note that whilst reading various studies about young peoples' reactions to and interactions with rapidly evolving digital technologies from the 2000s, it occurred to me that the subject of these studies is in fact my own age group. Some of the results are instinctively familiar to me; I was there, I experienced these things. Some are ridiculous. I don't know how my first-hand experience of growing up with technology (I was born in the same year as the Web, and my parents were early adopters) affects my reading of these studies, or my ability to study others' use of technology, but it is something I ponder.

By reflexively adjusting one’s perception of self in reaction to society, people construct their individual identity. [boydfacid]

Development of personal identity is not only something that happens internally. We are strongly influenced by feedback (conscious and unconscious) from others around us, as well as the particular setting and culture in which we find ourselves. How we react to things outside of our control in part determines our identity construction, and some people adjust their behaviour in response to feedback more than others [snyder74]. Thus identity is socially constructed, and often is dynamically adjusted according to context [boydfacid].

Giddens [giddens84] looks at the relationship between macro and micro views of the world, acknowledging that broader effects of society impact individual behaviour, and vice versa, with neither one being the primary driving force. This suits well my ideas about online self-presentation, confirming the complex interplay between technological affordances, individual actions, and the place of both in a cultural and social context.

Giddens argues that self-identity is an aggregation of a person's experiences, an ongoing account, and a continuous integration of events. In contrast to Goffman's dramaturgy, Giddens downplays the role of an audience, and in contrast to Brunswik's lens theory, he downplays what we can learn from the traces someone leaves behind. Giddens argues that self-identity cannot be uncovered from a moment, but something which is ongoing, over time. Modern society, according to Giddens, affords us more freedom to create our own narratives to determine our self-identity. In the past, rigid social expectations dictated our roles for us. However, increased choices about what to do with ourselves may also increase stress and prove problematic. Awareness of the body is central to awareness of the self, as the body is directly involved in moments we experience in daily life. As we are now explicitly constructing a narrative about our identities, rather than having one ascribed to us by society, the self is an ongoing project which takes work to maintain [giddens91].

The focus on explicit actions and decision making about self-presentation is pertinent when it comes to digital representations of identity.

Early to mid 20th century philosophers and social scientists complicate notions of the 'self' by combining it and extending it with our physical surroundings, and this view emerged long before the Web. Heidegger expresses technology as coming into being through use by a human; when tools are used the tool and its user do not exist as independent entities, but as the experience of the task at hand (using the example of a carpenter hammering, unaware of himself or his hammer) [manhammer]. McLuhan discusses media, literate and electronic, from the printing press and electric light to radio, TV and telephone, and its impact on how we communicate. He places communication technologies as simultaneously extensions of and amputations of our bodies and senses, which continuously and fundamentally re-shape the way we (humans) see and place ourselves the world [mcluhan]. More recently, Clark's Extended Mind Theory uses the example of a notebook as a means of externally processing information that would otherwise be carried out by the brain, drawing the external world in as party to our cognitive processes [clarkmind].

The next logical step is to consider how the modern digital technologies of Web and social networking can also be considered extensions of the self, and this is addressed in part by Luppicini's notion of Technoself [technoself]. Technoself incorporates (amongst other things) extension of the self through physical technology embedded in the body (cyborgology); in our changing understanding of what it is to be, as life is extended and augmented through advancing healthcare; but also in our relationships with our virtual selves. This is not a topic into which I will dive deeply from a philosophical standpoint, but the idea of the Web and online social networks as extensions to the self rather than as separate entities or concepts is worth bearing in mind as this thesis proceeds to explore the complexities of intertwined digital and offline identities.

In an interview, Facebook founder Zuckerberg said that "having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity" [fbeffect]. This received public backlash at the time, and on several more occasions as Facebook and other social networking sites imposed real name policies, sometimes linked to an official ID [boyd2012politics]. This removes a level of identity control which many people take for granted. A particularly clear example can be seen in the reaction of a community of drag queens who were used to being able to interact online using chosen names. Real name requirements removes a vital aspect of fluidity from their interactions, glossing over the seams which provide poignant performance material and a route towards a group identity [lingel2015face, barmann14drag]. Additionally the requirement for real names and the ability to report 'fake names' became a mechanism whereby a marginalised group could be harassed and silenced [hotmess2015selfies]. In general, an attitude that people should be happy to connect all of their identities together under a single legal name is an expression of social privilege: a result of having no features or proclivities which are socially censored.

Sandberg, whilst COO of Facebook in 2012, commented that profiles as detailed self portraits is a "shift towards authenticity" [digitalvertigo], but her organisation's notion of 'integrity' as a single complete version of oneself that is the same no matter to whom one is presenting is somewhat at odds with authenticity. Neither are people "intraviduals", caught between competing identities as claimed by Conley in 2009 [conleyintra], but expressing aspects of themselves appropriately and according to context. This is behaviour which we have already established via Goffman as ordinary offline, and so shouldn't be considered unusual online. One's 'authentic' self-presentation may be partial or moderated and no less genuine for that. Indeed, some individuals find they are more able to express their authentic selves online than they are offline due to oppression or social expectations which are disjoint from their core values.

However, in highly commercialised or competitive online environments, 'authenticity' is a quality to strive for, to maintain an audience. A Web search for 'authenticity on social media' will reveal a plethora of guides on how to craft an 'authentic' persona, how to maintain personal-but-not-too-personal ties with one's audience so that they see that you're just like them. For individuals who set out to explore and express their identity online, this can be a tricky world to navigate [duffy15b]. True authenticity in online communities is seen as disjoint with self-promotion and celebrity; popularity implies a reduction in authenticity, perhaps linked to 'selling out' or 'pandering' to an audience [donathboyd04, ellison07]. Whereas authenticity is often seen from an outside perspective as always something manufactured, an idealized reality [Marwick2010].

The idea that online spaces are under control of their owners suggests others may be suspicious of their authenticity [tong08] but reinforcement of social identity from others can counteract this. Warranting theory describes how information that appears to be outside of the subject's control—for example, a message posted publicly by a friend on someone's profile—can reinforce the trustworthiness of the other profile data to an outside observer [warrant, warrant1, warrant2].

"Some argue that distinct contexts are unnecessary and only encourage people to be deceptive. This is the crux of the belief that only those with something to hide need privacy." - [boydnp10]

Most people like to consider themselves to be quite honest in their communications with friends, family and acquaintances. However, even honest people routinely modulate what they share, omitting and sometimes falsifying information in order to reduce social friction, avoid confrontation, defuse awkward situations, or to save face [buller1996interpersonal, burgoon1989maintaining]. Hancock et. al. introduced the term butler lies to refer to a common use of simple lies to manage communications, such as smoothly exiting from an unwanted conversation [hancock2009butler]. Online, the notion of who our 'friends' are has become increasingly blurred and difficult to define. In such settings, people commonly navigate different social spaces, projecting and varying self-presentation according to the ways they want to be perceived by each [marwick2010TweetHonestly].

Whilst part of tailoring one's presentation to an audience is the ability to carry out some level of deception, with personal communications, there is an implicit expectation of authenticity [aoki2005Ambiguity]. However, online, the need to navigate multiple and uncertain audiences means that we may constantly vary our self-presentation. Authenticity becomes a social construct derived from the social context and how we wish to be perceived by a given audience [boyd2002faceted]. We may be deceiving, at least to some extent, nearly constantly without even being conscious of it.

Deception has long been studied, both within and outwith the HCI community. Traditionally, deception has been cast in a negative light [bok1978lying], to be used only if no other option is available. In the 1980s, however, communications researchers began to investigate the positive aspects of lying, in particular white lies - socially acceptable lies which cause little or no harm to the recipient [camden1984WhiteLies].

In 1992, McCornack cast deception as an understandable response to complexity: "[r]esearchers studying deception recently have begun to argue that deceptiveness is a message property that reflects a kind of functional adaptation to the demands of complex communication situations" [mccornack1009InformationManipulation]. People then manipulate the information which they share as a necessary part of participation in society. This has led to recent work on the positive aspects of deception in human computer interaction, in particular how butler lies are used to ease social situations [hancock2009butler], and how systems can deceive their users for beneficial reasons [adar2013Benevolent].

Several different taxonomies of lying and deceptive behaviours have been proposed [camden1984WhiteLies, depaulo1996lying, lindskold1983categories]; Anolli et al. examined a family of deceptive miscommunications, including self-deception and white lies [anolli2001DeceptiveMiscommunication]. They look at omission of relevant information, concealment using diversionary information, falsifaction and masking with alternative, false information. Of particular interest is their claim that "a deceptive miscommunication theory should be included in a general framework capable of explaining the default communication", that is that deception should not be seen as a psychologically different activity than 'normal' communication. This tallies with the earlier approach of McCornack [mccornack1009InformationManipulation] who situates deceptive messages within the spectrum of information manipulation. This, combined with the lens of Gricean conversational maxims, allows for an explanation of deceptions where some of the truth is told, but information which the speaker knows is relevant to the listener is omitted or obscured [grice1970logic].

Motivations for lying have also been extensively studied in social psychology. Turner et al.'s taxonomy included saving face; guiding social interaction; avoiding tension or conflict; affecting interpersonal relationships; and achieving interpersonal power [turner1975information]. Camden et. al. [camden1984WhiteLies] develop a detailed categorisation of lies to do with basic needs, managing affiliation with others, self-esteem and miscellaneous practices such as humour and exaggeration.

Many malicious or undesirable behaviours are facilitated by the ability to create and alter identities. Astroturfing [cho2011astroturfing] has become common online [zhang2014astroturfing], with corporations and governments employing sophisticated identity management software to carry out large scale operations. Possibly the most famous of this is the 50 Cent Party, hired by the government of the People's Republic of China to post favourable comments towards party policy [fiftycent]. On a smaller scale, sock-puppets — multiple accounts controlled by a single person — are used to skew ideas of consensus and distort discussion in online societies, leading to attempts to automatically identify such accounts [bu2013sock, solorio2013case]. Personas can be constructed for the purpose of trolling, whether it is overtly offensive in order to cause outrage or more subtle manipulation to trick people into wasting effort or taking caricatured positions, and correlations have been shown between enjoyment of trolling and everyday sadism [buckels2014trolls].

Many of these activities are a form of obfuscation, in some way hiding the truth, polluting the data pool and diminishing trust. The ethical issues here are complex and contextual, with the viewpoints of different actors having considerable divergence [brunton2011vernacular].

Another strand of research borrows from information warfare, to look at the possibilities for disinformation. Disinformation tactics are most useful when a channel of information cannot be completely closed, but can be rendered useless by being filled with incorrect, but plausible, assertions in order to lower its overall signal-to-noise ratio [wiki:disinformation]. The intended target of the lie may not be the official recipient of the message: lies can be directed at those who are eavesdropping on the communications channel or surveilling the participants [alexander2010Disinformation]. Techniques used include redaction to remove parts of the message, airbrushing to blur parts of the message and blending to make the message similar to other plausible messages, as well as other forms of information distortion [alexander2010Disinformation].

In chapter 3 I carry out two studies which aim to bring together these general theories of deceptive behaviour with a closer look at how and why people might engage in them online.

In Faceted Id/entity [boydfacid], boyd highlights several differences between self-representation offline compared to online. Embodiment is a key factor in self-presentation and she claims that there is considerable difference between performing one's identity through appearance, eg. fashion and body language, when walking into a room, compared to explicitly describing oneself by entering attributes and other personal information into an online form to create a profile. The disembodied nature of online interactions means that people must find new ways to express themselves, and manage the impressions other people have of them, or "a new type of body" [youth]. A lack of control over one's online self presentation is compounded by the inability to visualise - or perhaps even be aware of - the data that is collected by the systems we use. Online activities are logged over time to an extent that most individuals are not aware of; these activities, an individual's expressions given off (Goffman), are used, largely unknowingly, for the commercial benefits of third parties; this constitutes a kind of implicit or unconscious profile. boyd suggests that visualising all of one's personal information that is available online, as well as visualising one's 'audience' or social network connections, would provide an individual with better awareness of, and so better control over, their online image. In boyd's prototype interfaces, users are explicitly asked for personal data in order to build a profile of themselves, and boyd does point out the problematic nature of this, compared with the unconscious or implicit identity performance one conducts in offline social settings.

Counts in [counts09] explores the impact of profile attribute selection on self presentation, and finds that upon completing the values for 10 attributes, participants converge on their "ideal" representation of themselves. This study also finds that free-form attributes are better than ones with preset choices for participants' satisfaction with how they have portrayed themselves. This study does not take into account that most online profiles are created in a particular context, with a particular purpose in mind. Asking participants to express their ideal self-presentation 'in general' vastly oversimplifies reality. Participants are not told who the consumers of the profile they are creating are expected to be, or how it is to be presented; nor are participants given an opportunity to indicate who their expected audience is or what they think the profile is for.

Since boyd's prototypes were designed, social media gained widespread popularity. Most, if not all, mainstream systems request input of explicit personal data to build an initial profile, despite the discord of this activity compared with offline identity expression. However, unlike in boyd's prototypes, it doesn't stop there. Such systems encourage ongoing engagement through adding and messaging contacts with various degrees of publicness, creating status updates to broadcast a current situation, production of creative media content, and feedback on content and updates created by others. As we will see in chapter 3, contemporary social media builds one's profile from various combinations of these online activities, and typically use far more than the explicit data entered by the user to generate a representation of a person. This increases the likelihood that individuals may not have an accurate impression of what this representation looks like to others.

Recent studies confirm that visuals are a key part of expressing identity online. Many focus on selfies as a modern substitute for the body [vanhouse11, lasen15, senft15, frosch15], but [bunnies17] examines self-presentation through other kinds of photos. Examples include humerous images from popular culture or photographs of other things with an overlayed caption, coupled with a tag (eg. #currentstate) that indicates the poster relates to this concept; as well as photos of items that people carry with them day to day. In [papatwit12], self-expression is performed through use of Twitter hashtags, and [food15] suggests that food photography is a means of self-presentation.

Pointing at something and saying that one has chosen it as self-representative makes the assemblage of tags, text, and image a culturally intelligible self-representation [bunnies17].

A lack of embodiment can also have a distinct advantage. In [stendal12] several studies of people with disabilities who use online social systems are reviewed, and reveal findings about increased control over disclosure of disability (which may not be possible offline) and reduced isolation when people are able to interact online.

Next we look more closely at the behaviour of users of Social Network Sites, of which "profiles" are a key feature [boydsns07].

In 2007 boyd and Ellison defined Social Network Sites (SNS) to be Web-based, bounded, public or semi-public, and afford creating and viewing connections with or between other users [boydsns07]. They note that users of these systems tend to connect with others with whom they already have a 'real life' social relationship, and present a fairly thorough history of SNS from 1997 onwards, which I won't recount here. This definition is pertinent to this thesis due to its emphasis on profiles, implying self-presentation, as a core feature of SNS. In 2013 they updated their definition to incorporate different types of content and data into profiles; to de-emphasise the traversal of connections (as this became more important to machines than humans); and to emphasise participants' interaction with streams of user-generated content [ellison13]. I will proceed to focus on case studies and experiments which were carried out since these definitions, and due to the rapid pace of change in this area, prioritise those from the last four years.

Many studies of identity formation on social media focus on young people and teenagers. One reason is because this is a crucial point in life for understanding oneself and asserting a personal identity. Other studies approach teenagers as somewhat alien "digital natives", born into a world of social technology which is expected to fundamentally change how they interact with the world compared with older generations, who don't or can't distinguish between online and offline [borndigi]. I will relate the results of these studies, but note that I disagree with the notion of a "digital native" because being born in a particular year or even raised around modern technology does not automatically give one a natural instinct for identity expression in digital spaces, and not even necessarily more opportunity to experiment and reflect than older SNS users [boyd2014s].

Digital communication technologies can help or hinder identity formation. The App Generation [appgen] provides a balanced argument between the pros and cons of teenagers socialising through mobile applications. They find that some applications provide a "prepackaged identity" for users to adopt rather than encouraging experimentation. The affordances of applications shape the forms of expression that are available, and so identity formation is in a way controlled by the application designer. Born Digital [borndigi] suggests that teenagers experiment with identity online, but aren't fully aware, or don't care about, the traces that are left behind when they do so.

In some cases, for example fan communities, self-presentation shifts between a more playful fictional identity performance, and an identity which is closer to 'real life' [baker09]. In others, such as professional self-presentation, individuals lean on automatically generated metrics by the system they use to convey a positive image, with gamification or commodification of the self becoming commonplace [academicqs16]. When SNS provide a platform for professionalising passions such as content creation, [duffy15] notes that participants may be even more vulnerable to the consequences of performing and maintaining one's self-presentation in an exposed online space, as well as the "labour of visibility" that goes into it.

Most people occupy multiple roles offline, find ways to establish and maintain boundaries between them, and continue to do so to different degrees when taking representations of these roles to online spaces. SNS increase the permeability of boundaries, but users employ various tactics to manage their identity when a one-identity-per-person model is imposed on them [quinn15].

[singh15] describes how Twitter users subvert features of the system to express themselves in new ways, as well as reflecting on how changes to the functionality of they system affect how people use it. This supports [papatwit12] which, through content analysis of trending hashtags, also describes how people work around technical constraints of Twitter to meet their self-presentation needs.

Even in the early days of SNS (specifically Facebook) beginning to rise to popularity when use was overflowing into the workplace, the access control settings offered by Facebook were considered too complicated to enable most people to realistically manage connections with both professional and personal contacts from a single profile, despite the potential advantages of connecting with colleagues through the platform [DiMicco07]. More recently, we see that SNS users manage tensions between their multiple roles and the affordances of systems by segregating their audience across using multiple platforms. The interview study in [Zhao16] found that sharing decisions across multiple sites are made primarily based on the known audiences of the different sites, and the content being shared. This study also recounts previous work on motivations for using different SNS, including to connect with old friends, and share pictures, which feed into decisions taking regarding content sharing. A similar study found that family was a crucial audience to whom more private sharing was desired [Farnham11], and findings in [Vitak14] indicate that Facebook users desire to re-asssert their offline boundaries when online, and concurs that managing this through the tools that Facebook provides is cost-intensive. Facebook itself compounds this issue by using identity information as a "social lubricant" which encourages people to make new connections [ellison11fb].

Personal homepages and blogs have been around for considerably longer than SNS, though remain a comparatively specialist practice. It is widely accepted that blog or website owners have more control over their online space than do users of SNS, [intlblog, markus06], including freedom to innovate with the site's appearance and thus explore more individualistic aspects of the online self [alist05]. Relatedly, communities of bloggers are not owned or controlled by a single entity [dennen09].

Through observations of over 200 blogs within a particular community and semi-structured interviews with 40 bloggers, [dennen09] identifies five aspects which affect how bloggers build their identity: name and blog title; descriptive attributes; post content; voice; affiliations; and visual design. All of these are subject to change over time, and sometimes major offline transitions can cause a shift to a new pseudonym or blog altogether; often the audience is invited along however. Blogs are often designed to reinforce community norms, to enhance a sense of belonging; as a result, the community develops and evolves its own identity, which in turn influences how newcomers choose to present themselves. Bloggers' contributions are fragmented across different domains, and where their writing style and topics constitute a part of their identity, so it fragments their identity.

Blogging communities are traditionally more accepting of pseudonyms but [dennen09] notes that distrust is not of other community members, but rather of personally-known community outsiders who may accidentally stumble across blog entries.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Brunswik's lens model which describes a way in which identity can be constituted through physical traces left behind. This model has also been used to understand how observers make personality judgments about people based on the traces left in their digital space, ie. personal homepages [gosling08, markus06, vazire04, papacharissi02].

The importance of themes and designs of blogs and homepages is emphasised by [dennen09], who mentions that whilst some blog consumers use a feed reader to receive new content from the blogs they are interested in, they often click through to the original post to view it in the context of the author's own space.

On the other hand, [blogdesign] takes a snapshot of a random sample of blogs in 2003 and maps the state of the blogosphere through analysing visual elements in depth and tracking commonalities. The conclusion is that significant customisation of blog templates was in fact relatively rare, with most people only slightly tweaking colours or adding custom images. A likely explanation for this is that bloggers lacked the technical expertise to do so.

Studies of blogging communities outside of the US demonstrate that blogging is not a uniform practice that can be understood as a whole [intlblog]. Certain communities (in this case, Muslim ones) which are seen by outsiders as homogeneous use blogging to highlight their uniqueness and individuality. Others (for example in China) emphasise their ethnicity and culture as a key part of their identity. Blogs from the Paris Banlieues in fact had a direct impact on how the mainstream media portrayed their plight; an example of how personal identity expression in networked publics was able to affect a broader social understanding of that identity. The overriding message from these studies is cultural taboos and offline societal context affect narrative about identity, and this is reflected online.

The audience to whom one performs is critical in forming the context in which one is performing [boydnp10]. On SNS, people are often expressing themselves to multiple audiences simultaneously. When people are aware of this, they take different strategies when it comes to navigating what they share; individuals with many followers on Twitter practiced self-censorship (only posting things they are happy for the worst-case audience to read) and practicing coded communication (strategically targeting some posts at some audience members, and others at others, to maintain overall interest) [Marwick2010].

However, given the many possible ways in which Tweets can be discovered and consumed ([Marwick2010] questioned people who post publicly) it is virtually impossible to determine the actual audience for one's content. Thus, people imagine who their audience is likely to be, and express themselves accordingly. Obviously these imaginings, which may stem from understanding of the affordances of a particular platform, or a particular community or topic of discussion, impact how people express themselves online.

[litt12] theorises about how the imagined audience is synthesised, and draws in Giddens' structurational framework, noting a combination of macro- (social roles, technical affordances) and micro-level (individual motivations, technical skills) factors. [litt12] ultimately concludes that asking people about their imagined audience is prone to errors or misinterpretations, as imagined audience is a concept which is both difficult to measure and difficult to express.

Relatedly, as people perform in networked publics, they must contend with a "networked audience," who are not connected only with the performer, but also with each other [Marwick2010].

I have so far discussed how people attempt to map boundaries from their offline lives into their online interaction spaces, and the notion of imagined audience. Context collapse occurs when boundaries come down and personas intended for different audiences are merged [Marwick2010]. The consequences of this may range from slight social awkwardness, to direct breaches of privacy and potential danger, and have been examined in a variety of different circumstances, such as [daviscontext, contextwesch, duguay14, duguay13].

Thanks to the properties of networked publics such as searchability and persistence, contexts may also collapse when information is consumed later, or through a different systems, whereby it may be interpreted differently by the consumer than how it was originally intended [boydnp10].

As we look forward to how SNS and online self-presentation in general will evolve, we must consider how the lines people have drawn around their contexts are tethered to particular (versions of) systems. What happens when these systems change, merge, or disappear? As designers of new systems, we must be cognisant of the role technical affordances play in creating, enabling, and destroying social boundaries.