Goffman, E.. (1959). , “Introduction” (pp.1-17) in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Erving Goffman explaines that the best way to understand human action is by viewing individuals as actors on a larger “social stage”. Actors actively construct an impression of themselves for an audience. He explores the idea of a front and back stage. The front stage is where you project a certain self image, manipulating the setting, how we appear (i.e. clothing etc., and our behavior. This all falls under impression management and presented an idealised image.
Alhabash, S., & Ma, M. (2017). A tale of four platforms: Motivations and uses of facebook, twitter, instagram, and snapchat among college students? Social Media and Society. Michigan State University. 3(1) doi:10.1177/2056305117691544
Saleem Alhabash and Mengyan Ma apply the uses and gratifcations (U&G) framework to contrast Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat in terms of intensity use. They conduct a cross-sectional survey of college students. Their findings report that participants in their study spent the most time daily on Instagram, followed by Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter. One of the limtitation of this research is that it was primarily conducted with white female students. The authors note that further research should sample a more diverse demographic groups.
Duffy, B. E., & Chan, N. K. (2019). “You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social media platforms. Cornell Universtiy. New Media and Society, 21(1), 119-138. doi:10.1177/1461444818791318
In this study, Duffy and Chan seek to examine the self-presentation practices and activities of emerging adults. They conduct 28 in-depth interviews with college-aged youth and “highlighted how the imagined surveillance of various social actors steered their self-presentation practices in patterned ways.” Their findings indicate that “young people are socialized to anticipate digital surveillance from various social institutions – family, educators, and above all, employers” (Duffy & Chan, 132). Imagined surveillance influences what they choose and choose not to share on social media platforms. A limitation of their research is that it does not account for unequal distributions of surveillance, they even ask in their conclusion “who is more vulnerable to the disciplinary outcomes of imagined surveillance?” (Duffy & Chan, 133).
Márquez, I., Lanzeni, D., & Masanet, M. -. (2022). Teenagers as curators: Digitally mediated curation of the self on Instagram. Journal of Youth Studies, doi:10.1080/13676261.2022.2053670
This paper explores how teens perform digital identity on Instagram. They are particularly concerned with the idea of curation. They argue that the curating process entails “several aspects that are central to teenagers creating a digital persona on Instagram, including content creation, validation through ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ and socio-techno automation” (Marques et.all). The results of their research show that this curation can lead to a sort of ‘professionalization’ of the use of the platform, adopting an ‘influencer’ or ‘instagramer’ persona and practices. Teens carefully select what they choose to share in order to create who they want to be seen as.
Davis, J. L. 2017. “Curation: A Theoretical Treatment.” Information, Communication & Society.
Davis provides a framework for the mechanism of curation in the digital era. Davis theorizes that “digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume” (Davis, 770). Davis says that “curation refers to the discriminate selection of materials for display” (Davis, 771).
Carr, C.T., & Hayes, R.A. (2015). Social media: Defining, developing, and divining. Atlantic Journal of Communication.
Carr and Hayes explore how social media may “uniquely isolate and test communicative principles tot advance our understanding or human-human and human-computer interaction” (Carr & Hayes, 46). The authors predict that these new technologies will continuously become more deeply embedded into our daily interactions. Further they call for a “paradigmatic shift to include the role of nonhuman, system-generated, an algorithmic agents, reconceptualizing the very nature of what constitutes communication” (Carr & Hayes, 62).
Ryan, E., & Linehan, C. (2022). A Qualitative Exploration into Personal Psychological agency in Instagram Use. School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland.
This paper notes that most of the existing research on instagram suggests that the platform is a “standardised, homogenous, experience, much like watching a TV show or film” (Ryan & Linehan, 1). Ryan and Linehan seek to better understand the mjultitude of ways instagram users participate or not on the app in the creating and curation of their individual experiences on Instagram. They conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 participants, 10 females and seven males. The authors find that “participants are agents in their instagram use, successfully creating a personally mandated experience” (Ryan & Linehan, 9).
Yang, C. -. (2016). Instagram use, loneliness, and social comparison orientation: Interact and browse on social media, but don’t compare. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(12), 703-708. doi:10.1089/cyber.2016.0201
This study explores the relationship between loneliness and instagram activities. Yang’s findings show that instagram interactions and browsing “were both related to lower loneliness, whereas instagram broadcasting was associated with higher loneliness” (Yang, 1).
Yang, C. -., & Robinson, A. (2018). Not necessarily detrimental: Two social comparison orientations and their associations with social media use and college social adjustment. Computers in Human Behavior, 84, 49-57. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2018.02.020
This study focuses on two types of social comparison relating to college student’s adjustment period: Social comparison of ability (competitive), social comparison of opinion (non-competitive). The findings show that social comparison of ability had a negative impact on students adjustment to college whereas that if opinion had a positive association with adjustment. One limitation of this study was that the researchers findings were based on survey data collected at one point in time.
Huang, X., & Vitak, J. (2022). “Finsta gets all my bad pictures”: Instagram users’ self-presentation across finsta and rinsta accounts. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW1) doi:10.1145/3512916
The goal of this research is to explore the differences of self presentation between “rinstas” (real instagram accounts) and “finstas” (fake instagram accounts). The researchers analyze 499 Finsta and Rinsta posts and 453 open ended responses to participants rationales for using them. Their findings show that rinstas display more positive and uplifting content whereas finstas display more vulnerable and sometimes inappropriate content.