Online Self-representation Research Articles

Please look at me? Connecting self esteem and online self-presentation among teenagers on social media instagram

The evolving landscape of social media in the present day contributes to the revitalization of social relationship. The use of social media platforms continues to integrate into adolescents of life and essential for identity development. Adolescentes have a need for self-existence, and social media serves as a medium to fulfil this need within their friendship circles. This research aims to seek the relationship between self-esteem and online self-representation among adolescents who use instagram. This study employed quantitative approach with correlation method. The data were collected using two instruments: a self-esteem scale and online self-representation scale. The respondents of this research were 154 adolescents in MAN Bangkalan. The analysis was conducted using simple regression. The results showed that the self-esteem had a significant effect on online self-representation, resulting in meaningful contribution of 6%.

Professionelle Authentizitat

The idea of an authentic self is at the heart of building trust in NGO fundraising. This paper asks how personal fundraising by paid workers ( ‚dialogers‘) relates to expectations of authenticity. Building on a review of the online self-representations of NGO fundraising agencies’ and on an ethnographic study of fundraisers’ work, it traces where the concept of the authentic self becomes relevant in fundraising and how it relates to notions of neoliberal labour. A conceptual history of personal authenticity, attempts at interpretation from cultural studies and media studies, as well as reflections on authenticity in fundraising marketing serve as approaches to the research field and lead to an account of the dialogers’ narrative selves. This enables a reflection on how authenticity as a powerful discourse relates to NGOs and to neoliberal worlds of work in general. The paper aims to condense the broad theory on personal authenticity and relate it to salaried work in the context of voluntary engagement. Furthermore, the examination of this special case of professional trust work helps to review assumptions that all too quickly arise from the interpretive pattern of ‚neoliberalism‘.

The techno-beauty myth: the self-representations of young Chinese women on social media

ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate how young Chinese women use selfie-editing apps to create idealized versions of themselves and how these practices help them construct their identities. By conducting 30 interviews with highly educated Chinese women between the ages of 18 and 30 living in urban cities, the results of this study indicate that taking, editing, and sharing selfies have become increasingly embedded in their everyday lives. The female interviewees use the apps to narrow their jawline, change the size of their eyes and nose, remove acne, and smooth their skin, revealing that young women in China are not completely free of patriarchal beauty standards. However, the interviewees acknowledge that the selfies have captured their real lives and conveyed their personalities. They have been able to express their true selves and have gained self-pleasure from this process. In this way, the interviewees’ online self-representation is deeply linked to their offline lives. This study enriches current debates on women’s empowerment in contemporary China. The practice of online self-representation can be viewed as a process of self-actualization because it empowers women by solidifying their agency and further contributes to the formation of a reflexive identity.

The red lipstick movement: exploring #vermelhoembelem and feminist hashtag movements in the context of the rise of far-right populism in Portugal

ABSTRACT During the 2021 Portuguese presidential election campaign, far-right candidate André Ventura insulted the feminine presentation of left-wing candidate Marisa Matias, linking her use of red lipstick to a perceived lack of professionalism and implied sexualization. The Portuguese public reacted to this insult by launching the feminist hashtag movement—#VermelhoEmBelem (translated as #RedInBelem), which quickly became one of the few national feminist hashtag movements to reach widespread visibility, receiving national and transnational support. This article offers a critical analysis of the #VermelhoEmBelem movement, grounded on a direct unstructured observation of the cross-platform hashtag—mainly across Twitter and Instagram—complemented by an analysis of news articles about the movement. By focusing on #VermelhoEmBelem, this article explores the relationship between feminist action, gendered discourses, and far-right populist politics. It foregrounds how gendered insults can generate a wave of feminist solidarity and anti-fascist sentiments, which was reified through online self-representations of people of various genders with their lips painted red. Yet, it highlights how hashtag movements can encompass significant tensions—mobilising both widespread support and sexist backlash, carrying the potential for symbolic and consciousness-raising impact, while having limited impact on the results of the Portuguese elections the movement derived from.

Gay employees on social media: Strategies to portray professionalism

Abstract This study explores how gay male employees represent themselves on social media. Research shows that online self-representations vary according to imagined audiences and platforms’ affordances, but little is known about the possible roles of work in this process. In a qualitative study based on interviews and observations in the Brazilian subsidiary of a multinational automaker, I show how employees’ assessment of compatibility between professionalism and homosexuality leads them to adopt different strategies on Facebook and Instagram, platforms where work and other spheres of their lives overlap. These behaviors are dynamic, occurring in a process I label “testing the waters”: The gay men observe visible audiences’ reactions and change their online self-representations in response to these reactions. This study shows how worried, conscious, and strategic LGBTQIA+ employees are about their use of social media, in new spaces that reproduce old workplace pressures.

The Digital Archive of Diaspora: Blogging (Post)Migration

Transnational diaspora groups make intensive use of community media when communicating and connecting in cyberspace. In particular, I argue that blogs constitute a new kind of (post)migrant archive that compiles shared histories and experiences of diaspora. The principal role of the digital archive has become defined, not so much by storage, as by circulation and transfer, in what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (2002) calls the paradigm shift in the reconceptualization of the archive in the digital age.Indeed, circulation and transfer are also essential dimensions of the digital diaspora. Regarding the modes of interactions of diaspora communities on the web, I will analyse how (post)migrants’ online self-representation and their struggle to gain visibility shape new understandings of the digital archive of diaspora. My focus targets blogs as one of the most popular genres in cyberspace. The samples I analyse are written by (post)migrants and are often intended to decenter the German “Mehrheitsgesellschaft” [“mainstream society”] and diversify its artistic-intellectual scene.It has been shown that these new media settings also give rise to new forms of writing; for example, authorship is often collaborative. My thesis is that this very heterogeneous virtual collaboration often has the effect of transcending the contours of stable “Turkish”, “Arab” and/or “German” identities and of thus also contradicting dominant parameters of identity politics.This is the case with the collective blog “migrantenstadl” that is the subject of my analysis; “migriert, migriert, sonst sind wir verloren” [“migrate, migrate, otherwise we are lost”] is the motto of this often provocative project and an invitation to its readers. “Migration” is movement and mobility, whereas “Archive” is preservation, so how to construct an archive of migration on moving ground?While my primary interest is to explore and connect the concepts of digital diaspora and digital archive, I will try to give concrete form to my theoretical findings on this nexus by analysing the above-mentioned blog, which is a cultural and political initiative directed by Tunay Önder and Imad Mustafa that was founded in 2011.

Digital identities of female founders and crowdfunding performance: an exploration based on the LDA topic model

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate female founders’ digital identities (i.e. the founder’s online self-representation) and explore how female founders’ digital identities affect crowdfunding performance.Design/methodology/approachLeveraging a data set of 3,125 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns launched by women between 2014 and 2019, this study uses the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model to investigate female founders’ digital identities and explore their impacts on crowdfunding performance via logistic and Tobit regression analyses.FindingsThis study finds that on crowdfunding platforms, female founders display four main types of digital identities: educational practitioner, experienced entrepreneur, creative innovator and life dreamer. Moreover, our results reveal the differential influences of these identities on crowdfunding performance. Specifically, the experienced entrepreneur or educational practitioner portrayal may benefit fundraising; the life dreamer portrayal may hinder it; and the creative innovator portrayal may have no significant effect.Practical implicationsThis study suggests how women can use their digital identities to improve their crowdfunding performance, indicating a fruitful way to overcome female entrepreneurial financing hurdles in the digital age.Originality/valueThis study highlights the digital identities of female founders engaged in crowdfunding, enriching the emerging research on digital identity in entrepreneurship and crowdfunding. Furthermore, the application of the LDA topic model in the study enlightens future research on leveraging big data analytic methods to examine female entrepreneurship in the digital economy context.

Mujeres periodistas y activismo en redes sociales: un análisis de los hashtags #DeixaElaTrabalhar y #LasPeriodistasParamos en Instagram

The social media collective actions through the hashtags #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos raised problems that women journalists were suffering in both Brazil and Spain. While the representation of feminism has long been studied, less attention has been paid to comparative studies and the more personal representation. Focusing on a combination of visual and textual qualitative content analysis, we explore 90 Instagram posts from women journalists within the two hashtags and how they portray themselves in relation to their profession. At the time of writing, Instagram is one of the most popular social networks focused on the publication of audiovisual content. This makes it suitable for the study of online self-representation. The article identifies using the Documentary Image Analysis and the Critical Discourse Analysis the recurrent demands and denunciations regarding journalism gender-related issues and finds common visual vernaculars in #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos posts. This study makes a comprehensive analysis of how women journalists construct their identity on Instagram images concerning the topics they talk about and the elements they use to insert themselves in the female journalists’ collectives and connects it with the theories on feminism and social media activism. The results reported here shed new light on how female journalists take control over their situation and find empowerment, feminism, non-violent protest, and professional/private life to be common points regarding the identity construction in relation to these online groups.

Spanish gay male subjectivity, body, intimacy, and affect on Instagram

This article analyzes how a neoliberal understanding of identity shapes gay subjectivity, body, affect, and intimacy in digital environments, particularly Instagram. This social media has become one of the most relevant elements of gay subculture in Western countries, including Spain. Neoliberalism usually reduces gayness to a sort of global marketable brand which is understood as an individual attribute rather than a collective identity that provides common ground to fight for LGBT rights and against homophobia. Drawing on previous research on online self-representation and gay subjectivity, we specifically explore this global pattern in Spanish gay users of Instagram. To this end, we examine posts containing the tag #gaySpain uploaded between April and May 2020. In general, our research shows that the profiles tend to provide narratives of successful personal self-engineering and self-promotion, rather than activism and collective empowerment. These narratives present the gay body as a commercial product or something to be admired and consumed, whilst affect is part of an online highly ritualized performance and communication, and by no means a force for social change. As part of self-representation in social media, intimacy is constructed on Instagram for a large audience as an attractive example of a thriving gay life; in simple terms, Instagram has become gay show business like other manifestations of this subculture such as the Pride march.

Gendered self-representation and empowerment on social media in the United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT Social networking sites (SNSs) provide a set of affordances that allow young adults to represent various aspects of their gendered identities and construct their identity-related experiences. This paper adopts Goffman’s concepts in relation to social media and his dramaturgical theories of the self as a framework for the study of online self-presentation. The paper uses the Explanatory Sequential Mixed Method Design. The study conducted a quantitative survey of 110 college students followed by qualitative semi-structured interviews with a group of 30 students to examine how college students from four Emirati universities appropriate social media to engage in online self-representations of their gendered identities. The findings suggest that SNSs serve as a liberating force in a cultural context where traditional rules are changing and young adults are at the forefront of driving these changes.

The media image of Chinese older people: From stigmatic stereotype to diverse self-representation

From the perspective of communication and media studies, this article explores a comparison between the image of older adults presented on media and online self-representation facilitated by the use of smartphones. The qualitative textual analysis was conducted with a sample (228 posts, from 1 January to 31 December,2019) selected from a representative WeChat Public Account targeting at older adults in China. The results demonstrate that leisure and recreation is the most frequently mentioned topic (58%) with memories of past life receiving the least references (3%). The striking features of popular posts among older people include a highly emotional tone, bright colours and multimedia. Sentiment analyses shows 68.42%, 13.16% and 18.42% of positive, neutral and negative emotions, respectively. A generally positive attitude of self-representation is in a sharp contrast with the stigmatic media image of older adults. The article concludes that the visibility of Chinese older people may help to reduce the stigma surrounding old age in China.

“It’s Not Just Instagram Models”: Exploring the Gendered Political Potential of Young Women’s Instagram Use

With over one billion monthly users worldwide (Constine, 2018) and being embedded in the everyday lives of many young people, Instagram has become a common topic of discussion both in popular media and scholarly debates. As young women are amongst the predominant active users of Instagram (WeAreSocial, 2019) and the demographic stereotypically associated with online self-representation (Burns, 2015), Instagram carries an underlying gendered political potential. This is manifested through online political practices such as hashtag activism (Highfield, 2016), as well as through Instagram’s use of user-generated content to challenge existing politics of representation, broadening the scope of who is considered photographable (Tiidenberg, 2018). This article explores how this gendered political potential is understood by young women using Instagram. This research is based on 13 in-depth interviews with a theoretical sample of female ‘ordinary’ Instagram users (i.e., not celebrities or Insta-famous), aged 18–35. Our findings illustrate how the perception of political potential is grounded in the participants’ understanding of Instagram as an aesthetically-oriented platform (Manovich, 2017). Most participants recognised the potential for engaging in visibility politics (Whittier, 2017), representing a wider diversity of femininities often absent from popular media. However, this was seen as tempered by the co-existence of idealised beauty conventions and the politics of popularity within social media (Van Dijck & Poell, 2013). Furthermore, this political potential is accompanied by the possibility of receiving backlash or being dismissed as a slacktivist (Glenn, 2015). As Instagram becomes a central part of contemporary visual cultures, this article seeks to critically explore the nuanced ways in which young women’s everyday experiences of Instagram intersect with broader cultural and political questions of gender representation.

English neologisms in online self-representation

English neologisms in online self-representation

Social Media Blueprints: A Study of Self-Representation and Identity Management

The landscape of social dimensions has tremendously changed with the existence of so-cial media as a powerful means to facilitate the process of creating and sharing infor-mation. The navigation, constructions and features of mediated communication fashion on social media have led to the forming of identity blueprints, consisting of narrative strategies in deploying and managing online identity. As a result, fascinating digital stories are formed wherein the content is curated to portray the desired identity. With the aim to examine the extent of gender-based perspective and tendencies in managing mediated identities through social media, this study employed a Mann-Whitney test to measure the variance between male and female responses. The results obtained indicate that statistically, there is a significant difference for both genders in the ways they manage their mediated selves and identities. This study also provides an insight on how social media platforms and specific interfaces like emojis are used as a tool to manage and shape mediated identity, reinforcing the concepts of online self-representation and identity management.

‘Write when it hurts. Then write till it doesn’t’: athlete voice and the lived realities of one female professional athlete

ABSTRACT Digital media has played a central role in promoting women’s sport, where female athletes are increasingly using online platforms to control their own representations and challenge male dominated sporting institutions. Alternatively, some commentators claim that female athletes’ use of digital media contributes to patriarchal practices in sport, where through self-promotion and image building they do little to advance representations of women’s sport. This paper interrogates these ideas, adopting a postfeminist sensibility and collaborative research approach to examine the online self-representations of a female athlete and blogger. The athlete in question is Meghan MacLaren, a professional golfer on the Ladies’ European Tour who documents her life as a professional athlete through her online blog. Primarily, the authors present a critical analysis of MacLaren’s blog posts over a period of three years, from MacLaren turning professional to the present day. This initial analysis prompted a series of questions around MacLaren’s blogging and self-representations, which the authors then posed directly to her, and Meghan was invited to respond in her own voice. Using a collaborative approach with MacLaren as co-author, this paper seeks to draw attention to the diverging realities of a female professional athlete fulfilling dichotomous identities as a simultaneously trusting and doubting golf performer on the course and a self-appointed athlete activist online, all the while operating in, and influenced by the patriarchal and capitalist cultural environment of golf.

Disease risk and its moderating effect on the e-consultation market offline and online signals

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of disease risk in terms of the major signals (i.e. status, reputation and self-representation) on the e-consultation platforms.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the proposed research hypotheses are tested using the transaction data collected from xywy.com (in Need of Therapy). In fact, xywy.com is one the leading e-consultation service websites in China that provides a platform for the interactions between the physicians and patients (Yu et al., 2016; Peng et al., 2015). Generally speaking, it has all the needed design elements and in other words, a standard e-consultation website should have such items/components as physician homepage, physician review, free consultation, paid consultation and recommendation systems.FindingsThe obtained results reveal that all attributes including status, reputation and self-representation have a positive impact on physician’s online order volume. Moreover, there is a positive moderating effect of disease risk onto the online reputation, indicating a higher effect exists for the diseases with high risk. However, the effect of offline status and online self-representation is not moderated by the disease risk, indicating market signals (online reputation) may have a stronger predictive power than seller signals (offline status and online self- representation), and therefore market signals are more effective when/if the disease risk is high.Originality/valueE-consultation has gradually become a significant trend to provide the healthcare services, in the emerging economy such as China because of shortage of medical resources but having an adequate access in internet usage. The impacts of signals on the health care market have been validated by previous studies. However, the research focusing on the moderating effect of signaling environment in the health care industry is still lacking. As a result, the value of this research helps to bridge the aforementioned research gap.

The Presentation of Self as Good and Right: How Value Propositions and Business Model Features are Linked in the Sharing Economy

The sharing economy as an emerging field is characterized by unsettled debates about its shared purpose and defining characteristics of the organizations within this field. This study draws on neo-institutional theory to explore how sharing organizations position themselves vis-à-vis such debates with regard to (1) the values these organizations publicly promote to present themselves as “good” sharing organizations and (2) the business model features they make visible to appear as having the “right” organizational model. This study examines the online self-representations of 62 prototypical sharing organizations in Germany with regard to value propositions and business model features. A semantic network analysis of the features reveals two distinct categories of sharing organizations: grassroots initiatives and platform-based organizations. By showing how value propositions and business model features are linked in the sharing economy, the findings indicate the different legitimation strategies of grassroots initiatives and platform-based organizations, which we term “sustainability by model” and “sustainability by feature.” These findings broaden our understanding of the strategies that organizations apply to cope with societal expectations in the emerging sharing economy.

Online self-presentation of Malaysian women: a Facebook case study of university students

Social networking websites play an important role in our lives. These websites provide several services that allow users to enjoy their time in cyberspace by providing them space to represent their personalities in the virtual world. Using Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, this study aims to identify the way Malaysian women represent themselves, by depicting and managing their virtual identities through Facebook while exploring the way they construct their identities and realize their online presence. A convenience sampling survey was used to collect data through Facebook. A total of 133 female students from a Malaysian university were involved in the study on their self-representations (online and offline); highlighting the way they presented their identities online and suggesting whether their offline influenced the virtual identities. It also explored the relationship between offline and online self-representation among the students. The findings showed a changing self-representation of the Malaysian women based on their utilization of the different Facebook services. The concept of “I” and “you” on the front and backstage is invoked as a theoretical form to understand how representation is made among the close and distant others. The findings showed a significant effect of the offline feelings on the Online self-representation and revealed a strong relationship between the offline and online presence. It indicated the difficulty of separation between virtual and real identity.

“To Put Others Before Yourself”: Volunteerism and Mental Health in US Veterans’ Projects

Abstract The post-9/11 wars produced a new generation of US veterans. As the military campaigns dragged on over extended periods, public discourse on the wars refueled ongoing discussions from the Vietnam era about veterans’ social and psychological wellbeing. The public increasingly voiced concerns about psychological injuries such as posttraumatic stress, veterans’ postwar reintegration struggles, and suicides. This article will discuss two NGOs organized by and for veterans to analyze how their activism responds to the sense of social crisis prevalent in these public debates on veterans’ affairs. It will present the projects’ online self-representation and their documentation in activist scholarship and journalism to carve out how civic engagement in veterans’ affairs challenges the traditional myth of American individualism to promote volunteerism and community service as vehicles for reintegration, promoting – and enacting – the civil-military social contract.

Online self-representation in Brazil's favelas: Personalising the periphery

This paper focuses on blogs, Web sites, and social media pages produced from Brazil’s favelas to study existing notions of online self-representation. Semi-structured interviews conducted with 21 media producers questioned if favela media can really forge a new image of dwellers by creating new representations or by reversing past media stereotypes. Results revealed that dwellers have often appeared in their own media as new community leaders, or as journalists, and frequently, as conveyors of culture and personality. This paper shows that personalising the life in favelas is emphasised, through which producers tailor a more individualist, less-victimised image of themselves.