Exaggerated identities: 'becoming' online
With the Euros happening at the moment, I’ve been reminiscing about ex-England players with the kids. Obviously Gazza came up, amongst a few others and I had a go at trying to liken him to current players. One of the differences, Naomi and I were telling the kids, is that back then there was a lot more crazy behaviour amongst footballers. Dentist chair, or sniffing-the-touchline-type celebrations were probably never really a great thing to see school children reproducing on the playground, but I would argue that for famous sports people and other celebrities, the coming of social media and a life online has contributed to a change in how influential people regulate their behaviour.
It is important to consider on different levels what teenagers are engaging in when they take to social media. On the face of it, a profile appears as a symbolic representation of an identity: if we are considering the exhibitional approach (which I’ve written about before here) then the title across the online presentation of the self could be “This is me!” However, in recent years the public understanding of social media content has progressed to recognise the disparity between what is presented online and the reality of real life.
In this post I’m going to talk about influencers and how young people construct their identities online. The ideas I’m using come from some of the work of Stuart Hall, who is a great writer of social theory who draws on loads of different sources and presents his ideas in a way that most people can pick up pretty quickly. In particular I want to use two of Hall’s important ideas regarding identity: the process of becoming (1990) and his theory of representation (1997).
Becoming Online
Through his exploration of ‘Caribbean cultural identity’, Hall (1990) questioned the notion of identity as being essential and fixed. He suggests three different ‘presences’ (p230) that contribute towards a Caribbean identity: African, with it’s poetic ancestry of art and expressionism, European colonisation that brings language and infrastructure and an American ‘New World’ presence formed from fusions of different influences. Hall argued that diaspora navigate different positions within the discourses of this history and culture, and identities are shaped at their intersection in a process of “becoming’ as well as ‘being’’ (p225). The Caribbean cultural identity therefore depends on its political stereotyping and is constructed through its representation, which we see primarily through the media. For Hall (1997) representations create identities rather than reflect them.
Hall was not alone in highlighting the fluid nature of identities; Giddens (1991) proposed a reflexive ‘project of the self’ within his theory of structuration. Individuals actively work on their identities and construct them in their interactions with others, so the conscious performance of social media users is, in itself, formative. Furthermore, social media users continuously redefine social media landscapes through the ways they use different platforms rather than simply embracing and aligning to the patterns of practice on any given platform.
Both Giddens and Hall’s ideas predate the rise of social media so it is important to consider this new mechanism by which identities can be constructed and highlight the differences in interactions. Social media allows users to curate their own presentation of the self: if a person wishes to be seen as naturally glamourous then they can put time into creating a representation of themself that appears glamourous through the use of filters, lighting, post-editing, and spontaneous through staging. They can take multiple photos before selecting the one that appears the most unplanned and authentic. All of this backroom work and preparation is not seen by the audience: performances are no longer bound so as to be spatial and temporal, but rather instantly universal and eternal, accessible to all audience members, but at the behest of the audience or through the work of the platform’s algorithm that determines who sees what.
A consequence of the way users interact with social media is that social media as a structure becomes active in the construction of new identities. Hall’s notion of becoming (1990) says that when cultural presences intersect at new positions then cultural identities are formed in reference to those presences, but not as historic replicas. There is loads in the media these days about the distilling effects of social media algorithms, but if we take a hypothetical social media user as an example, we can consider their interactions and the flow of events: A ‘stereotypical’ heterosexual teenage boy may be interested in football and girls, and as a consequence they will engage with content that has been shared to social media that includes either of these. In order to sign up users acknowledge that data is collected about their browsing. For users of Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta), if a user watches approximately 3 seconds of video then the platforms will record that interaction as a ‘view’ (Meta, 2024a), and similarly if a user clicks on an image. This information is used to provide a ‘personalised experience’ (Meta, 2024b), with content that the user is more likely to enjoy prioritised by the algorithm to be ‘pushed’ towards them.
McDonald et al (2024) interviewed teenage (13-17 years old) social media users and found that while most were aware that they were seeing personalised content because of their interactions with the media, they were generally unaware but unconcerned that this data was tracked and shared across apps. The personalised content was considered to be a reflection of the individuals’ identities: “suggesting, by implication, that the curated content is not just "for you" but also "about you" -- a mirror reflecting important signals about the person you are. (McDonald et al. 2024). Users also felt that they could easily avoid content that they disagreed with, or which ‘contradicts their sense of self’, however research suggests otherwise: the nature and delivery of social media content encourages users to engage for longer and exposes them to increasingly extreme content through a ‘rabbit hole’ effect (Harringer at all, 2022), the effects of which on are considered concerning enough to have prompted the European Commision to launch proceedings (European Commission, 2024) investigating Meta’s potential infringement of the Digital Services Act (2022).
Getting sucked into content online is for many, pretty frustrating because it can waste a lot of an evening watching reels of the same sort of stuff, and not really knowing on reflection why you didn’t stop and go do the washing up rather than have to do it now you’re knackered and want to go to bed (that’s maybe a personal one), but the implications for young people are considered more significant: Paechter’s (2007) description of young people as apprentice adults can be used to explain how teenagers use adult behaviour as an example of what it means to be a man or woman. Paechter said that peripheral members of communities of practice are primarily tasked with learning how to perform as full members, so a teenage boy looks to adult men to work out how they behave, and it’s this that concerns the European Commission: becoming online through exaggerated representations.
Influencers
The practice of curating an identity is exemplified by social media influencers, individuals with an engaged audience of followers, to whom they can promote ideas or market products by sharing a ‘personal narrative’ (Forbes, 2016) with their audience. Social influencers are not a new phenomenon, and children have forever been exposed to significant others such as parents, teachers, celebrities through various media. These significant others present symbolic representations of roles, and might in the eyes of the child hold an aspirational social/cultural position that the child will be motivated to reproduce. Previously, access to significant others was generally reserved to front-stage performances which might be given live or recorded through traditional media. Occasionally the mysticism that exists around a celebrity could be dispelled by either a public mistake, or by unlicensed access to their back-stage, such as the paparazzi image of celebrity caught off-guard. If we go back to our sports stars example at the start then there are loads, like the pictures as a footballer leaves a club at 4am or mishaps on pedalos as with Freddie Flintoff. But the nature by which influencers present over social media is unique: influencers build a following by giving the impression of allowing followers access to back-stage performances. By curating content that appears authentic they encourage, in the mind of the follower, a deeper level of connectivity between the influencer and the follower (Glucksman, 2017), a resource which is utilised by businesses who pay for influencers to endorse their brands.
Social media allows individuals the ability to prepare their representations of their own stylised identities, through exhibitions. According to Hall, representations describe cultural positions whether an accurate description or not, so he insisted that the interrogation of representations is important for understanding the truth behind what is presented – he wanted people to question what they see in the media. But the critical analysis by which we can judge a representation is often lost on social media through the mechanisms of gaining trust and through casting a veil over the efforts to curate a performance in order to appear authentic. This is done by offering a commentary on life that is presented as ‘behind the scenes’, a view into the hidden ‘private lives’ of a person (Heel, 2019) but is in fact carefully crafted. Authenticity is a key theme of Goffman’s work, raising the question time again of what authenticity is when actors are constantly performing. In her analysis of influencer culture, Abidin (2018) describes the ‘tacit labor’ of influencers involved in a performance of being relatable to followers which includes practices such as ‘staged authenticity’ whereby“…influencers deliberately try to portray the raw aesthetic of a novice”, or ‘porous authenticity’ through which an audience is invited to see how genuine a person is through a controlled trail of ‘real life’ intentionally left by the actor (Abidin, 2018). In this way social media is able to blur the distinctions between front and backstage performances, with actors engaging in ‘scheduling’ whereby they can control the presentation and timing of impressions in order to shape their interactions. Part of the strength of social media structures in affecting behaviour is that it presents a version of reality where all users can themselves become influential by reproducing what relatable influencers do.
A significant difference between the identity construction of the social media celebrity and that of the school pupil is that pupils cannot control their interactions to the same extent as they have to live a duality of life online and face to face with a common audience for both, so for almost all young social media users, there mates that see them at their best and worst in school, make up at least a sizeable chunk of their online mates. Far from being an avenue of escapism, online activity has thrown back the curtains that separate frontstage and backstage performances such that individuals continue to be judged on their performances when they leave the usual realm of interaction, such as the school for the school pupil. This brings with it a pressure to stay engaged on social media, which researchers have found leads to individuals posting from fear of being ‘seen as abnormal’ if they did not. To coin Goffman again (1959, p111), “Performers can stop giving expressions but cannot stop giving them off”.
References:
Forbes, K. (2016). Examining the Beauty Industry’s Use of Social Influencers. Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications. 7(2), 78 – 87.
Giddens, A. (1991). The consequences of modernity. Polity Press.
Glucksman, M. (2017). The Rise of Social Media Influencer Marketing on Lifestyle Branding: A Case Study of Lucie Fink. Rise of Social Media Influencer Marketing on Lifestyle Branding. 77-87.
Hall, S. (1990). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp. 222-237). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Hall, S. (1997). The Work of Representation. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (pp. 13-58). London: Sage.
Harriger, J. A., Evans, J. A., Thompson, J. K., & Tylka, T. L. (2022). The dangers of the rabbit hole: Reflections on social media as a portal into a distorted world of edited bodies and eating disorder risk and the role of algorithms. Body Image, 41, 292-297.
Mcdonald, N., Seberger, J. S., & Razi. A. (2024). For Me or Not for Me? The Ease With Which Teens Navigate Accurate and Inaccurate Personalized Social Media Content. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 904, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642297
Meta (2024a) 3 second video plays. Accessed from: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/743427195703387 . Accessed May 2024
Meta (2024b) The AI behind unconnected content recommendations on Facebook and Instagram. Accessed from: https://ai.meta.com/blog/ai-unconnected-content-recommendations-facebook-instagram/ . Accessed May 2024
Schwartz, R., & Halegoua, G. R. (2015). The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media. New Media & Society, 17(10), 1643-1660. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814531364
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