Self-Presentation in Social Media: Review and Research Opportunities
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper reviews existing research on self-presentation in social media in order to inform future research. Social media offer seemingly limitless opportunities for strategic self-presentation. The composition of an impression manager’s audience from one platform to the next varies across social media platforms, impacting and often complicating the attainment of self-presentation goals in the midst of context collapse. Social media users can employ a variety of strategies in an attempt to reach their goals and successfully influence how others perceive them. Although we have learned much from this body of literature, a more comprehensive theory of self-presentation in the hypermedia age is needed to further advance this area of research. Recommended variables to consider in online self-presentation include individual variables, culture/group membership, motivations, channel-specific variables, self-presentation content generated by self and others, as well as effectiveness of self-presentation.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The philosophy of the journal is to be open and to make all articles accessible. It is our belief that open access is a must in the future of science.
Authors who publish with RCR accept a slightly modified Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
You, as author, retain the copyrights for your paper, but the Review of Communication Research is granted exclusivity for publication of the article. The agreement allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and publication in this journal. We do not want third parties to make a commercial use of the article, unless we agree it with authors.
The journal will run an open review process as well as a traditional peer review process.
When the manuscript is accepted for publication, it will get a doi number and get available online to facilitate early citation.
The journal will post the published article to many public repositories for further diffusion and permanence.
You, as author, are permitted and encouraged to post your work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on your website), as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
If you have any doubts, please, contact the editor: editor@rcommunication.org
Many thanks for submitting your work to this journal.
References
Bazarova, N. N., Taft, J. G., Choi, Y. H., & Cosley, D. (2012). Managing impressions and relationships on Facebook: Self-presentational and relational concerns revealed through the analysis of language style. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 32(2), 121-141. doi:10.1177/0261927X12456384
Bertel, T. F. (2016). ‘Why would you want to know?’: The reluctant use of location sharing via check-ins on Facebook among Danish youth. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 22(2), 162-176. doi:10/1177/1354856514543250
Birnholtz, J., Burke, M., & Steele, A. (2017). Untagging on social media: Who untags, what do they untag, and why? Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 166-173. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.008
Birnholtz, J., Fitzpatrick, C., Handel, M., & Brubaker, J. R. (2014). Identity, identification, and identifiability: The language of self-presentation on a location-based mobile dating app. Proceedings of ACM MobileHCI, Toronto, ON, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery.
Blackwell, C., Birnholtz, J., & Abbott, C. (2014). Seeing and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using Grindr, a location-aware gay dating app. New Media & Society, 17(7), 1117-1136. doi:10.1177/1461444814521595
boyd, d. (2007) Why youth <3 social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth Identity and Digital Media (pp. 119-142). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
boyd, d. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). New York: Routledge.
Boz, N., & Guan, S.-S. A. (2017). ‘Your profile is so rad’: Self-presentation strategies in Turkish adolescents. Communications, 42(1), 23-46. doi:10.1515/commun-2017-0003
Brunswik, E. (1956). Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burke, M., Kraut, R., & Marlow, C. (2011). Social capital on Facebook: Differentiating uses and users. Proceedings of ACM CHI ‘11 (pp. 571-580). Vancouver, BC, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery.
Carr, C. T., Hayes, R. A., & Sumner, E. M. (2018). Predicting a threshold of perceived Facebook post success via likes and reactions: A test of explanatory mechanisms. Communication Research Reports, 35(2), 141-151. doi:10.1080/08824096.2017.1409618
Chen, Y.-N. K. (2010). Examining the presentation of self in popular blogs: A cultural perspective. Chinese Journal of Communication, 3(1), 28-41. doi:10.1080/17544750903528773
Child, J. T, & Petronio, S. (2011). Unpacking the paradoxes of privacy in CMC relationships: The challenges of blogging and relational communication on the Internet. In K. B. Wright and L. M. Webb (Eds.), Computer-mediated communication in personal relationships (pp. 21-40). New York: Peter Lang.
Child, J. T., Petronio, S., Agyeman-Budu, E. A., & Westermann, D. A. (2011). Blog scrubbing: Exploring triggers that change privacy rules. Computers in Human Behavior, 27, 2017-2027. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.05.009
Choi, T. R., & Sung, Y. (2018). Instagram versus Snapchat: Self-expression and privacy concern on social media. Telematics and Informatics, 35, 2289-2298. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2018.09.009
Choi, Y. H., & Bazarova, N. N. (2015). Self-disclosure characteristics and motivations in social media: Extending the functional model to multiple social network sites. Human Communication Research, 41, 480-500. doi:10.1111/hcre.12053
Cramer, H., Rost, M, & Holmquist, L. E. (2011). Performing a check-in: Emerging practices, norms and ‘conflicts’ in location-sharing using Foursquare. Proceedings of ACM MobileHCI, Stockholm, Sweden: Association for Computing Machinery.
Davis, J. L., & Jurgenson, N. (2014). Context collapse: Theorizing context collusions and collisions. Information, Communication & Society, 17(4), 476-485. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2014.888458
de Souza e Silva, A. (2013). Location-aware mobile technologies: Historical, social, and spatial approaches. Mobile Media & Communication, 1(1), 116-121. doi:10.1177/2050157912459492
DeAndrea, D. C., & Walther, J. B. (2011). Attributions for inconsistencies between online and offline self-presentations. Communication Research, 38(6), 805-825. doi:10.1177/0093650210385340
DeVito, M. A., Birnholtz, J., & Hancock, J. T. (2017). Platforms, people, and perception: Using affordances to understand self-presentation on social media. Proceedings of ACM CSCW ’17 (pp. 740-754). Portland, OR: Association for Computing Machinery. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998192
Dominick, J. R. (1999). Who do you think you are? Personal homepages and self-presentation on the World Wide Web. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 76(4), 646–658. doi:10.1177/107769909907600403
Duguay, S. (2016). ‘He has a way gayer Facebook than I do’: Investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site. New Media & Society, 18(6), 891-907. doi:10.1177/1461444814549930
Ellison, N. B., Hancock, J. T., & Toma, C. L. (2011). Profile as promise: A framework for conceptualizing veracity in online dating self-presentations. New Media & Society, 14(1), 45-62. doi:10.1177/1461444811410395
Ellison, N., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 415-441. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00020.x
Evans, S. K., Pearce, K. E., Vitak, J., & Treem, J. W. (2017). Explicating affordances: A conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 22(1), 35-52. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12180
Facebook. (2019). What names are allowed on Facebook? Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/help/112146705538576/
Fitzpatrick, C., Birnholtz, J. & Gergle, D. (2016). People, places, and perceptions: Effects of location check-in awareness on impressions of strangers. Proceedings of ACM MobileHCI (pp. 295-305). Florence, Italy: Association for Computing Machinery. doi:10.1145/2935334.2935369
Fox, J., & Mooney, M. C. (2015). The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. Personality and Individual Differences, 76, 161-165. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2014.
Frame, A., & Brachotte, G. (2015). Le tweet stratégique: Use of Twitter as a PR tool by French politicians. Public Relations Review, 41, 278-287. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.11.005
Goffman, E. (1959). Presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Guha, S., & Birnholtz, J. (2013). Can you see me now? Location, visibility, and the management of impressions on foursquare. Proceedings of ACM MobileHCI (pp. 183-192). Munich, Germany: Association for Computing Machinery.
Haas, S. M., Irr, M. E., Jennings, N. A., & Wagner, L. M. (2010). Communicating thin: A grounded model of online negative enabling support groups in the pro-anorexia movement. New Media & Society,13(1), 40-57. doi:10.1177/1461444810363910
Hall, J. A., Pennington, N., & Lueders, A. (2014). Impression management and formation on Facebook: A lens model approach. New Media & Society, 16(6), 958-982. doi:10.1177/1461444813495166
Hayes, R. A., Smock, A., & Carr, C. T. (2015). Face[book] management: Self-presentation of political views on social media. Communication Studies, 66(5), 549-568. doi:10.1080/10510974.2015.1018447
Hearn, A. (2017). Verified: Self-presentation, identity management, and selfhood in the age of big data. Popular Communication, 15(2), 62-77. doi:10.1080/15405702.2016.1269909
Heston, M., & Birnholtz, J. (2016). (In)visible cities: An exploration of social identity, anonymity, and location-based filtering on Yik Yak. iConference 2016 Proceedings. Retrieved from: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/89297/
Heston152.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y doi:10.9776/16152
Hogan, B. (2010). The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(6), 377-386. doi:10.1177/0270467610385893
Jeong, H. J., & Lee, M. (2013). The effect of online media platforms on joining causes: The impression management perspective. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 57(4), 439-455. doi:10.1080/08838151.2013.845824
Jin, S.-A. A. (2013). Peeling back the multiple layers of Twitter’s privacy disclosure onion: The roles of virtual identity discrepancy and personality traits in communication privacy management on Twitter. New Media & Society, 15(6), 813-833. doi:10.1177/1461444812471814
Jung, T., Youn, H., & McClung, S. (2007). Motivations and self-presentation strategies on Korean-based ‘Cyworld’ weblog format personal homepages. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(1), 24-31. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9996
Jyrkiäinen, S. (2016). Online presentation of gendered selves among young women in Egypt. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 9, 182-198. doi:10.1163/18739865-00902005
Katz, J. E., & Crocker, E. T. (2015). Selfies and photo messaging as visual conversation: Reports from the United States, United Kingdom and China. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1861–1872.
Kim, H., & Papacharissi, Z. (2003). Cross-cultural differences in online self-presentation: A content analysis of personal Korean and US home pages. Asian Journal of Communication, 13(1), 100-119.
Kim, J. W., & Chock, T. M. (2017). Personality traits and psychological motivations predicting selfie posting behaviors on social networking sites. Telematics and Informatics, 34, 560-571. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2016.11.006
Koliska, M., & Roberts, J. (2015). Selfies: Witnessing and participatory journalism with a point of view. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1672-1685.
Laing, A. (2017). Authors using social media: Layers of identity and the online author community. Publishing Research Quarterly, 33, 254-267. Doi:10.1007/s12109-017-9524-5
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological Bulletin, 107(1), 34-47.
Leavitt, A. (2015). ‘This is a throwaway account:’ Temporary technical identities and perceptions of anonymity in a massive online community. Proceedings of ACM CSCW ’15 (pp. 317-327). Vancouver, BC, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery. doi:10.1145/2675133.2675175
Lee, S., Quigley, B. M., Nesler, M. S., Corbett, A. B., & Tedeschi, J. T. (1999). Development of a self-presentation tactics scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 26(4), 701-722.
Lemay, D. J., Doleck, T., & Bazelais, P. (2017). ‘Passion and concern for privacy’ as factors affecting Snapchat use: A situated perspective on technology acceptance. Computers in Human Behavior, 75, 264-271. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.05.022
Litt, E. (2012). Knock, knock. Who’s there? The imagined audience. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 330-345. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705195
Litt, E., & Hargittai, E. (2016). The imagined audience on social network sites. Social Media + Society, 2, 1-12. doi:10.1177/2056305116633482
Lyons, E. J., Mehl, M. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Pro-anorexics and recovering anorexics differ in their linguistic Internet self-presentation. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 60(3), 253-256. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2005.07.017
Macek, J. (2013). More than a desire for text: Online participation and the social curation of content. Convergence, 19(3), 295-302. doi:10.1177/1354856513486530
Manago, A. M., Taylor, T., & Greenfield, P. M. (2012). Me and my 400 friends: The anatomy of college students' Facebook networks, their communication patterns, and well-being. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 369-380. doi:10.1037/a0026338
Marder, B., Joinson, A., Shankar, A., & Thirlaway, K. (2016). Strength matters: Self-presentation to the strongest audience rather than lowest common denominator when faced with multiple audiences in social network sites. Computers in Human Behavior, 61, 56-62. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.03.005
Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313
Meyrowitz, J. (1986). No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mou, Y. (2014). Presenting professorship on social media: From content and strategy to evaluation. Chinese Journal of Communication, 7(4), 389-408. doi:10.1080/17544750.2014.938669
Norman, D. A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.
Ongun, E., & Demirag, A. (2014). An evaluation of Facebook users’ blocking tendencies regarding their privacy and secrecy settings. Global Media Journal: Turkish Edition, 5(9), 263-279.
Pavalanathan, U., & Eisenstein, J. (2015). Audience-modulated variations in online social media. American Speech, 90(2), 187-213. doi:10.1215/00031283-3130324
Pearce, K. E., & Vitak, J. (2016). Performing honor online: The affordances of social media for surveillance and impression management in an honor culture. New Media & Society, 18(11), 2595-2612. doi:10.1177/1461444815600279
Pounders, K., Kowalczyk, C. M., & Stowers, K. (2016). Insight into the motivation of selfie postings: Impression management and self-esteem. European Journal of Marketing, 50(9-10), 1879-1892. doi:10.1108/EJM-07-2015-0502
Quinn, K. (2014). An ecological approach to privacy: ‘‘Doing’’ online privacy at midlife. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(4), 562-580. doi:10.1080/08838151.2014.966357
Rui, J. R., & Stefanone, M. A. (2013). Strategic image management online. Information, Communication, & Society, 16(8), 1286-1305. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2013.763834
Saker, M. (2017). Foursquare and identity: Checking-in and presenting the self through location. New Media & Society, 19(6), 934-949. doi:10.1177/1461444815625936
Schlenker, B. R. (1985). Identity and self-identification. In B. R. Schlenker (Ed.), The self and social life (pp. 65-99). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schwartz, R., & Halegoua, G. R. (2015). The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media. New Media & Society, 17(10), 1643-1660. doi:10.1177/1461444814531364
Scott, C. R. (1998). To reveal or not to reveal: A theoretical model of anonymous communication. Communication Theory, 8(4), 381–407.
Sheer, V. C. (2011). Teenagers’ use of MSN features, discussion topics, and online friendship development: The impact of media richness and communication control. Communication Quarterly, 59(1), 82-103. doi:10.1080/01463373.2010.525702
Smith, A., & Anderson, M. (2018, March). Social media use in 2018. Pew Research Center.
Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/
Smith, L. R., & Sanderson, J. (2015). I’m going to Instagram it! An analysis of athlete self-presentation on Instagram. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(2), 342-358. doi:10.1080/08838151.2015.1029125
Stanyer, J. (2008). Elected representatives, online self-presentation, and the personal vote: Party, personality, and webstyles in the United States and United Kingdom. Information, Communication, & Society, 11(3), 414-432. doi:10.1080/13691180802025681
Storsul, T. (2014). Deliberation or self-presentation? Young people, politics, and social media. Nordicom Review, 35(2), 17-28.
Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321-326.
Sundar, S. S., & Limperos, A. M. (2013). Uses and grats 2.0: New gratifications for new media. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 57(4), 504-525. doi:10.1080/08838151.2013.845827
Taylor, P. (2014). More than half of Millenials have shared a ‘selfie.’ Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/04/more-than-half-of-millennials-have-shared-a-selfie/
Tiidenberg, K., & Whelan, A. (2017). Sick bunnies and pocket dumps: ‘Not-selfies’ and the genre of self-representation. Popular Communication, 15(2), 141-153. doi:10.1080/15405702.2016.1269907
Toma, C. L., Hancock, J. T., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Separating fact from fiction: An examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1023-1036. doi:10.1177%2F0146167208318067
Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.
van Oosten, J. M. F., Vandenbosch, L., & Peter, J. (2017). Gender roles on social networking sites: Investigating reciprocal relationships between Dutch adolescents’ hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity and sexy online self-presentations. Journal of Children and Media, 11(2), 147-166. Doi:10.1080/174.82798.2017.1304970
Veltan, J. C., Arif, R. & Moehring, D. (2017). Managing disclosure through social media: How Snapchat is shaking boundaries of privacy perceptions. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 6(1), 220-250.
Vitak, J. (2012). The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 451-470. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.732140
Vitak, J., Blasiola, S., Patil, S., & Litt, E. (2015). Balancing audience and privacy tensions on social network sites. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1485-1504.
Walden, J. A., & Parcha, J. M. (2017). ‘This is a stage’: A study of public relations practitioners’ imagined online audiences. Public Relations Review, 43, 145-151. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2016.11.002
Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1), 3-43.
Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, B., Hamel, L. M., & Shulman, H. C. (2009). Self-generated versus other-generated statements and impressions in computer-mediated communication: A test of warranting theory using Facebook. Communication Research, 36(2), 229-253. doi:10.1177/0093650208330251
Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, V., Kim, S.-Y., Westerman, D., & Tong, S. T. (2008). The role of friends’ appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on Facebook: Are we known by the company we keep? Human Communication Research, 34, 28-49. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00312.x
Waltorp, K. (2013). Public/private negotiations in the media uses of young Muslim women in Copenhagen: Gendered social control and the technology-enabled moral laboratories of a multicultural city. The International Communication Gazette, 75(5-6), 555-572. doi:10.1177/1748048513491912
Zhao, C., & Jiang, G. (2011). Cultural differences on visual self-presentation through social networking site profile images. Proceedings of ACM CHI ‘11 (pp. 1129-1132). Vancouver, BC, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery.