Abstract
When interacting with each other virtually on social media sites, users may potentially encounter their own “self-presence”. To improve their physical self-presence on social media, users might resolve to curate themselves to match their ideal perceptions of themselves and others. This study examines the intention to alter one’s factual self in real life whilst contemplating the on-line self on social media. Data were derived from a social survey of Vietnamese adults. The results indicate the remarkable mediating relationship from the level of editing self-images to three choices of intention to change the body image in real life. Nevertheless, this paper does not provide enough evidence to confirm any link connecting distal intentions (D-intentions), proximal intentions (P-intentions) and motor intentions (M-intentions) with private self-consciousness, with the latter as the moderator variable. This study, therefore, might provide an exclusive idea of how online behaviour can be related to one’s offline behaviour in terms of body image. With an understanding of this aspect, many implications can be found in regard to applications/programmes in research, development and marketing.
Highlights
Social media users may construct their “self-representation” via interactions on social networking sites
Our analysis found additional direct relationships, for instance, a positive relationship between private self-consciousness and body image
The findings reveal that female social media users who heavily edit their self-photos before posting them on Facebook commonly report low body image
Summary
Social media users may construct their “self-representation” via interactions on social networking sites. Stated by Tamborini and Skalski in their research conducted in 2006, “self-presence” signifies the state formed through a chain of reactions from feeling a sense of affinity between one’s online and offline self to raising awareness of oneself in the virtual world It has been advocated by many studies that social media could be considered an “identity performance” (Thumim, 2012; Ellison and Boyd, 2007; Westlake, 2008). Tamborini and Skalski (2006) divided self-presence activities into two types: (1) self-presence in connection with offline context; and (2) self-presence in disconnection with offline context An example for this is the experiment conducted by Vasalou and Joinson (2009), in which each participant was asked to design their own personal avatar for three networking platforms. The same idea could be found in other studies of Baym (1998), Elias and Lemish (2009), Grisso and Weiss (2005), Herring et al (2004), and Vasalou and Joinson (2009), which establish a connection between online and offline selfinvolving virtual replication of racial and sexual dynamics
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