Topic > Identity - 761

Some young people create profiles like their friends, they want to join their peer group and share a common experience with their friends. Joining like-minded peers appeals to their collective self-esteem, which ultimately gives them the unexpected pleasure of expressing themselves on SNS profiles. Often, young people provide specific information (e.g., name, date of birth, relationship status) on SNSs, although such disclosure is often considered personalized. Generating a profile is an explicit act of signing up in a digital environment (Boyd D., 2008). and participants must determine how they want to present themselves to those who can see their self-representation or to those who they wish could. With the ability to publish, share and tag photos on SNS it represents a major advancement in the ability to communicate. Before, if you wanted to share digital photos, you had to email everyone to let them know. With SNS and News Feed, when you post new photos to Facebook, your friends automatically receive a notification in their News Feed. People will see the photos on the wall when they visit your profile page. In addition to being a place for self-introductions, profiles are a place where people gather to converse and share. Conversations happen on profiles, and a person's profile reflects their schedule. As a result, young people do not have complete control over their identity. Users are asked to invite their friends to the SNS once they have created their profile. When the relationship is confirmed, the two become Friends in SNS and their relationship is included in the public bulletin board 'News Feed'. These four characteristics – profiles, photos, friends, and news feeds – differentiate Facebook from other types of computer-mediated communication. Many young people sign up for SNS to keep in touch with their friends. When viewing profiles, they are provided links to their friends' friends and so they can spend hours surfing the net, clicking from 'Friend' to 'Friend'. By looking at the profiles of others, young people often get a sense of what types of presentations are socially appropriate; the profiles of others provide critical insights into what to present on your profile. (Boyd D., 2008) Many young people also manipulate profiles to express themselves through the choice of images and answers to questions. As Manuel Castells (1997) points out, identity is people's source of meaning and experience. From a sociological perspective, human beings come into the world with an identity based on qualities such as gender, race, family economic status, etc...