Social dramaturgy and online self-presentation a case study of the Dark Fetish Network

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the social media site Dark Fetish Network. This online social networking platform has been analyzed through an internet ethnography approach, drawing on the knowledge of social dramaturgy theory. Dark Fetish Network gathers users who have different fetishes that often include fantasies about socially unacceptable practices and criminal acts such as murder, cannibalism, mutilation of the body (of other people, but also their own) and so on. The subject of this research is the communication and self-representation of DFN users in the online sphere. Registered users of this platform highlight information that indicates their „dark“ fantasies and fetishes through which they wish to portray themselves, occupying „desired“ roles. The basic hypothesis of this paper is that DFN users attract other users with similar or at least compatible fetishes (for example, sadism and masochism) because of their expressive reusers. This paper is based on an ethnographic analysis of user-profiles that entailed qualitative analysis of the content of their profiles and participant observation. The analysis concludes that users express their fetish with a profile photo and group membership in most of the cases, but also that there are users with a specific fetish who didn’t highlight it with these resources. Besides, the nickname has proven to be a very powerful expressive resource because it has helped the user (author of this paper) to attract other users with similar preferences, thereby retaining the basic hypothesis.