Profiles

The profile page is where we spend most time when we first create a social media account and this chapter is about how our identities are expressed in them. It begins with a case study of the 'A Gay Girl in Damascus' hoax, and what that tells us about honestly expressing oneself online. The structure of profiles is critical, as differences in customisation between social media services produce different levels of fakery. Hence, it may seem easier to implicitly display our identities by association, rather than explicitly describing ourselves in words: 'show rather than tell'. As a result, this chapter also explores how we can experience feelings of inauthenticity if we put too much work into trying to express ourselves accurately. This leads to a discussion of the privacy paradox: where social media users profess themselves to be concerned with privacy issues yet post considerable amounts of personal information to their profiles. Consequently, this chapter explores how we may also find it easier to use temporary accounts or anonymous social media services with no profiles at all. The profile page is probably the most absorbing feature of social media - certainly where people spend most of their time when they first create an account. In one of the earliest studies on social networking sites, Alice Marwick examined how users of Friendster, Myspace and Orkut presented themselves. Although this 2005 paper is comparatively ancient in social media terms - of those services, only Myspace is still operational - the points made in it remain insightful today. The first issue Marwick noticed is that social networking sites have fixed profile structures. Crucially, Marwick points out that social networking sites insist on users having a single identity. While this has varied from one service to another, requiring users to actually be themselves, usually with their real names, made a change from earlier forms of computer-mediated communication, where pseudonyms and anonymity were more common.