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How do we present ourselves online? Validation of the Presentation of Online Self Scale

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T1 - How do we present ourselves online? Validation of the Presentation of Online Self Scale

AU - Chen-Wilson, Chao-Hwa

AU - Fullwood, Chris

AU - Asbury, Titus

AU - Keep, Melanie

AU - Kirwan, Grainne

N1 - Conference code: 22nd

PY - 2017/7/26

Y1 - 2017/7/26

N2 - The Internet offers featuressuch as anonymity, opport Unities forasynchronous interaction and greatercontrol over what individuals shareabout themselves. These features aresuggested to promote optimal self-presentation (Walther & Parks, 2002).Individuals with certain characteristics(e.g. introverts) are also more likely toexperiment with self-presentation online,perhaps because of perceived limitationsin their offline interactions or becausethey are especially motivated to garnerdesirable impressions (Fullwood, 2015).However, there is yet an instrumentavailable that measures and identifiesdifferent types of self-presentationbehaviour in cyberspace. This studyaims to validate a questionnaire, thePresentation of Online Self Scale (POSS)that measures an individual’s propensityto experiment with self-presentationonline. The scale has been piloted onadolescents (Fullwood, James andChen-Wilson, 2016). To examine POSS’sreliability, adults in four English-speakingcounties (Australia, UK, Ireland and theUS) are being recruited to completethe questionnaire. Factor analysis willbe conducted to see if the four factorspreviously identified in adolescents arestill valid: ideal self, multiple selves,consistent self, and online presentationpreference. Data from the followingquestionnaires are being collected toexamine the POSS’s construct validity:Self Monitoring Scale (Snyder, 1974),Facebook Intensity (Ellison et al., 2007),Social desirability scale (Crowne andMarlowe, 1960), Social anxiety scale(Leary, 1983) and the Self-conceptclarity Scale (Campbell et al, 1996). Thedata collection is on going with a currentsample size of over 100 participantsfrom the UK and Ireland. This paper willpresent the preliminary results from thefinal sample

AB - The Internet offers featuressuch as anonymity, opport Unities forasynchronous interaction and greatercontrol over what individuals shareabout themselves. These features aresuggested to promote optimal self-presentation (Walther & Parks, 2002).Individuals with certain characteristics(e.g. introverts) are also more likely toexperiment with self-presentation online,perhaps because of perceived limitationsin their offline interactions or becausethey are especially motivated to garnerdesirable impressions (Fullwood, 2015).However, there is yet an instrumentavailable that measures and identifiesdifferent types of self-presentationbehaviour in cyberspace. This studyaims to validate a questionnaire, thePresentation of Online Self Scale (POSS)that measures an individual’s propensityto experiment with self-presentationonline. The scale has been piloted onadolescents (Fullwood, James andChen-Wilson, 2016). To examine POSS’sreliability, adults in four English-speakingcounties (Australia, UK, Ireland and theUS) are being recruited to completethe questionnaire. Factor analysis willbe conducted to see if the four factorspreviously identified in adolescents arestill valid: ideal self, multiple selves,consistent self, and online presentationpreference. Data from the followingquestionnaires are being collected toexamine the POSS’s construct validity:Self Monitoring Scale (Snyder, 1974),Facebook Intensity (Ellison et al., 2007),Social desirability scale (Crowne andMarlowe, 1960), Social anxiety scale(Leary, 1983) and the Self-conceptclarity Scale (Campbell et al, 1996). Thedata collection is on going with a currentsample size of over 100 participantsfrom the UK and Ireland. This paper willpresent the preliminary results from thefinal sample

KW - Self concept

KW - online presentation

M3 - Conference Contribution

BT - The 22nd Annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference

PB - University of Wolverhampton

T2 - CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference.

Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 28 July 2017

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How different online self-presentations relate to life satisfaction differently in college students: The role of positive online feedback and self-esteem

• Published: 24 August 2022
• Volume 42 , pages 25460–25475, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Lumei Tian   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1011-600X 2 ,
• Ruonan Zhai 1 ,
• Pengyan Dai 1 &
• Jieling Cui 1  

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In the Internet age, some online factors, such as online self-presentation, related to life satisfaction have received much attention. However, it is unclear whether and how different strategies of online self-presentation are linked to an individual’s life satisfaction differently. Accordingly, the present study examined the possible different relationships between different online self-presentations and life satisfaction with a sample of 460 Chinese college students. Using a series of questionnaires, a moderated mediation model was built in which positive online feedback was a mediator and self-esteem was a moderator. The results indicated that: (1) positive self-presentation was negatively associated with college students’ life satisfaction, whereas honest self-presentation was positively related to it; (2) positive online feedback was a significant mediator in such relationships; (3) the mediation process was moderated by self-esteem. Specifically, positive self-presentation was negatively related to positive online feedback only for high self-esteem college students, but negatively associated with life satisfaction only for low self-esteem ones. By contrast, honest self-presentation was positively associated with positive online feedback despite the level of self-esteem, but positively linked with life satisfaction only for those with low self-esteem. The findings suggest that honest rather than positive online self-presentation should be conducive to college students’ life satisfaction, particularly for those with low self-esteem. The implications were discussed.

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Introduction

Life satisfaction, as a key indicator of well-being, refers to how an individual overall assesses and feels his or her lives during most of the time or a certain period of time (Diener et al., 2002 ; Maddux, 2018 ). It has been shown to be positively related to many personal psychological, behavioral, interpersonal, and social outcomes (Proctor et al., 2009 ). It can mediate the association of adverse life events with suicidal ideation as well (Yang et al., 2020 ), and improving individuals’ life satisfaction helps reduce the risks of mental disorder (Chen et al., 2017 ). Therefore, identifying its contributing factors has long been concerned by scholars.

Traditionally, when an individual has a high quality of social network and perceives much social support from this network, he or she will have a high level of life satisfaction (Lebacq et al., 2019 ) because good interpersonal communication produces positive emotion and affect (Diener et al., 1991 ). In the Internet age, however, online social networking sites (SNSs) have been indispensable mediums for individuals to present themselves and communicate with others (Pew Research Center, 2018 ). They remain an effective way of online socialization for individuals who are capable of maintaining personal relationships with friends from near and far (Brailovskaia et al., 2020 ). Therefore, some online factors related to life satisfaction have attracted much attention. This topic is especially important in certain periods, such as a special time of the COVID-19 pandemic when individuals have fewer face-to-face social contacts and turn to SNSs for happiness.

On SNSs, individuals can post photos and videos, likes, comments, and share their personal stories with others (Aljasir et al., 2017 ; Kuss & Griffiths, 2017 ). When they present this personal information, some individuals may selectively show information that are beneficial to the self in order to actively make themselves look positive in public (Wright et al., 2018 ); In contrast, others would rather express themselves in a real and sincere way, disclosing their personal information deeply. Numerous studies have indicated that the quantity of online self-disclosure is positively linked to subject well-being (SWB) (Bij de Vaate et al., 2019 ; Chan, 2021 ; Jang et al., 2018 ; Kim & Lee, 2011 ; Tyler et al., 2018 ) or life satisfaction (Kereste & Tulhofer, 2019 ; Pang, 2018 ; Wang, 2013 ). However, it is not well answered whether and how different self-presentation strategies are associated with them differently. Accordingly, the current study explored the possible different relationships between different self-presentations on SNSs and life satisfaction and a mediating role of positive online feedback in these associations as well as a moderation role of self-esteem in the mediating process.

Online self-presentation and life satisfaction

In terms of relationship management, the strategies of online self-presentation can be divided into two contrasting categories (Kim & Lee, 2011 ): positive self-presentation and honest self-presentation. The former refers to selectively revealing or highlighting one’s positive aspects in order to create a good impression on SNSs. In contrast, the latter is more strongly associated with one’s honest self that represents one’s real characteristics, reflecting the way users authentically disclose their feelings, thoughts as well as life events on SNSs.

According to the self-discrepancy theory posited by Higgins ( 1987 ), people often copmare their own actual self with the ideal self, while a larger discrepancy between the two will lead to more negative psychological outcomes, such as disappointment and anxiety. Actually, Facebook users usually disclose more positive emotions rather than negative ones on Facebook (Ziegele & Reinecke, 2017 ). This positivity bias on Facebook seems likely to attenuate the willingness to present real, but negative information (e.g., distress). It will lead to a larger difference between the real self and the virtual self, and then produce negative emotions (Grieve et al., 2020 ). In this sense, inauthentic self-presentation on SNSs can be related to many psychological problems of maladjustment (Grieve & Watkinson, 2016 ), such as high social anxiety (Duan et al., 2020 ; Twomey & O'Reilly, 2017 ), low self-esteem (Manago, 2015 ), poor psychosocial well-being (Michikyan et al., 2014 ), and problematic social networks use (Li et al., 2018 ). In other words, concealing one’s self behind positive self-presentation may result in negative emotions and adverse thoughts (D’agata & Holden, 2018 ; Jackson & Luchner, 2017 ).

In contrast, individuals can have higher self-concept clarity regarding social anxiety (Orr & Moscovitch, 2015 ) and improve subjective happiness in honest self-presentation (Jang et al., 2018 ). Sharing honest personal information, thoughts, and feelings enables people to express themselves, buffer negative feelings, and provide psychological benefits (Kim & Dindia, 2011 ). Research has found that people who present their real self on SNSs have more positive affect, less negative affect (Reinecke & Trepte, 2014 ), greater happiness particularly for those high self-esteem individuals (Jang et al., 2018 ), and higher levels of SWB (Lee & Borah, 2020 ).

Social penetration theory (SPT; Taylor, 1968 ) can also explain the association of honest self-presentation with life satisfaction from the aspect of interpersonal relationships. SPT proposes that information disclosed to others has different types and layers, and that the development of relationships depends on how individuals reveal their personal information, such as their attitudes, feelings, and likes, to each other (Taylor & Altman, 1987 ). Honest self-presentation on SNSs is a special way for individuals to present their true self to their friends (Nadkarni & Hofmann, 2012 ), which can enhance interpersonal trust and the intimate relationship between friends (Lin & Utz, 2017 ), and help individuals accumulate social capital and obtain social support (Sosik & Bazarova, 2014 ). Specifically, honest self-presentation on SNSs helps to construct and maintain good social ties (Lee et al., 2011 ), and contributes to relief of individual depression and loneliness, and to improvement of individual life satisfaction (Chai et al., 2018 ; Grieve & Watkinson, 2016 ). Meanwhile, for all tested demographic groups, interpersonal relationships have been found to be an obvious contributor to life satisfaction (Bermack, 2014 ).

Despite accumulating evidence supporting different relationships between different self-presentations and life satisfaction, empirical evidence of comparing them directly in a same study is very scarce. Thus, by incorporating previous literature, we aimed to fill this gap and hypothesized that positive self-presentation would be negatively linked with life satisfaction, whereas honest self-presentation would be positively related to it (H1).

Positive online feedback as a mediator

When presenting ourselves, we generally imagine and speculate how audience respond to us, and typically search for such feedback from others to evaluate ourselves (Goffman, 1959 ). On SNSs, a unique feature is that audience feedback is available, immediate and quantifiable (Schlosser, 2020 ). As a result, users can often obtain timely feedback after online self-presentation (Metzler & Scheithauer, 2018 ). Among them, positive online feedback is an important type of social support, mainly in the form of positive and timely evaluations during online interactions (Liu & Brown, 2014 ). Specifically, it refers to the supportive responses that individuals receive after they post or update personal information on SNSs, such as likes (Metzler & Scheithauer, 2017 ) and positive comments (Bazarova et al., 2015 ). Previous research has indicated that adults’ different areas of self-presentation on Facebook are related to positive feedback from the online audience (Liu & Brown, 2014 ; Yang & Brown, 2016 ). This perceived positive online feedback also can lead to positive social consequences (Brailovskaia & Margraf, 2019 ). Positive feedback indicates being accepted, concerned, and socially supported, implying that the responder has positive attitude to the individual, and solidifying their relationship (Lee et al., 2014 ; Liu & Brown, 2014 ). Accordingly, positive online feedback should be a key mediator in the relationship between online self-presentation and life satisfaction.

In terms of the relationship between different self-presentation and positive online feedback, positive self-presentation can not contribute to people’s mental health or relationship if people are unable to trust in others on SNSs (Kim & Baek, 2014 ), whereas those who present themselves in a “courageous” and even self-deprecating way acquire much social support (Bareket-Bojmel et al., 2016 ). Although we usually regard self-derogation as a problematic behavior which may cause to adverse social outcomes (e.g., social reject) (Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013 ), some studies support that self-derogation is not always unfavorable while self-enhancement does not always lead to positive outcomes. For example, research has found that people tend to consider those who like to enhance themselves but fail to show an expected performance actually as boastful and give them low evaluations (Schlenker & Leary, 1982 ), whereas undergraduates who choose to self-derogation when presenting themselves on SNSs receive increased positive feedback from their social network (Bareket-Bojmel et al., 2016 ).

As found, the deep and real self-disclosure on SNSs can gain more social support (Hampton & Lu, 2015 ; Ko & Kuo, 2009 ; Seo et al., 2016 ). When individuals present broader, deeper, and more authentic information on SNSs, they will get more online feedback from their friends (Yang, 2014 ). Only when individuals seek support via honest and sincere self-disclosure, can they receive it with a greater likelihood from others (Greene et al., 2006 ; Li et al., 2020 ), which could be beneficial to their SWB (Bij de Vaate et al., 2019 ; Luo & Hancock, 2019 ). While presenting a positive but untrue self, one can not receive helpful social support from their Facebook friends and thereby can not really feel happy (Oh et al., 2014 ).

On the basis of the above literature, we concluded that positive self-presentation would be negatively linked to positive online feedback but honest self-presentation would be positively associated with it.

In terms of the relationship between positive online feedback and life satisfaction, positive online feedback has been consistently found to be positively related to individuals’ social support (Lee et al., 2014 ; Liu & Brown, 2014 ; Wohn et al., 2016 ) and life satisfaction (Satici & Uysal, 2015 ; Wenninger et al., 2014 ). According to uncertainty reduction theory, interactive and verbal strategies are good ways for individuals to solve the relational uncertainty (Jin & Pena, 2010 ; Neuliep, 2012 ). Positive online feedback is very common during online interaction. It helps individuals understand how their friends see them by providing certain information for them (Brashers et al., 2004 ). Previous research has also found that the affirmation and recognition from others can effectively improve the attitude and evaluation towards oneself (Sung et al., 2016 ; Yang, 2014 ), which can improve their life satisfaction and happiness (Scissors et al., 2016 ). Given that social support is a vital source of happiness, and related to improved well-being (Haber et al., 2007 ), positive feedback, a more specific type of social support, provided by one’s online friends such as likes and comments may also positively contribute to the individual’s happiness and SWB (Kim & Lee, 2011 ; Zell & Moeller, 2018 ). In other words, the more social support from positive online feedback individuals perceived, the higher life satisfaction level they had (Nabi et al., 2013 ; Shahyad et al., 2011 ).

Accordingly, by incorporating previous literature, we predicted that positive online feedback would be a key mediator in the associations of different self-presentations with life satisfaction (H2). It has been shown to mediate the relationship between honest self-presentation and life satisfaction (Liu et al., 2016 ). It can mediate the association between self-disclosure on SNSs and bonding social capital as well (D. Liu & Brown, 2014 ). It also plays a mediating role in the link between online self-presentation and individuals’ self-esteem (Meeus et al., 2019 ). However, empirical evidence of its mediating role in the different relationships between different self-presentations and life satisfaction is scanty. Therefore, we aimed to narrow this gap in the current study and tested this hypothesis.

Self-esteem as a moderator

In addition to the mediating role of positive online feedback at an environmental level, self-esteem, one’s positive or negative attitudes towards the self (Rosenberg, 1965 ), may serve as a key moderator in this mediation model at an individual level.

According to previous experimental results, those high self-esteem individuals not only show more defense against negative information, but also accept less negative information (Zhou et al., 2018 ). By contrast, individuals with low self-esteem are not only more likely to perceive external rejection information (Zhou et al., 2018 ), but also more likely to perceive others’ behavior as rejection (Kashdan et al., 2014 ), thus perceiving less positive feedback. This is because low self-esteem individuals can not focus on their own qualities and do not have the ability to overcome negative or rejection information (Tazghini & Siedlecki, 2013 ). Therefore, for people with low self-esteem, in the case of receiving a large amount of feedback after self-presentation on SNSs, those negative rejection messages may attract their attention first. In the study of Cameron et al. ( 2009 ), individuals whose self-esteem is either high or low expressed failure information to their partners and received same positive feedback, but people with low self-esteem could not correctly perceive the positive feedback provided by their partners, and reported less positive feedback than their counterparts.

The “poor get poorer” Internet theory proposes that overuse of SNSs may destroy individuals’ well-being, and this negative effect is even worse particularly for people who lack adequate psychosocial support from others in daily life (Selfhout et al., 2009 ; Snodgrass et al., 2018 ). Thus, individuals with low self-esteem may perceive less positive feedback and life satisfaction than those high self-esteem ones when they present themselves on SNSs. Furthermore, according to the self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987 ), when individuals present themselves positively on SNSs, the discrepancies between their actual self-state and ideal self-state will be greater for low self-esteem individuals than for high self-esteem ones, signifying more loss of positive outcomes and more dejection-related emotions. In addition, high self-esteem can operate as a buffer which can mitigate the negative effect of using positive self-presentation due to its low vulnerability to loss and strong resilience, in accordance with the buffer hypothesis (Arndt & Goldenberg, 2002 ), but people with low self-esteem would suffer a lot. Consequently, we deduced that positive self-presentation would be related to less positive feedback and life satisfaction, particularly for low self-esteem individuals.

In contrast, individuals with high self-esteem feel better about themselves and are more likely to believe themselves as attractive or popular than do their counterparts (Wood & Forest, 2016 ). They believe they are lovable, deserving of attention, and feel that if they are in trouble, others will respond to their needs and be ready to help them (Palermiti et al., 2017 ). As a result, they are able to feel more loved and accepted by others. In addition, they are more likely to perceive others’ supportive responses when they present themselves on SNSs (Greitemeyer et al., 2014 ; Sun et al., 2017 ). Thus, high self-esteem individuals would be more confident and easeful when showing the self honestly to online friends than low self-esteem ones. By disclosing true oneself on SNSs, they would also reveal more competence and thus perceived more positive online feedback and life satisfaction (Jang et al., 2018 ; Ryan & Deci, 2000 ).

Similarly, from the aspect of “rich get richer” theory, individuals who have good social skills and adequate social support will benefit more from the Internet use (Kraut et al., 2002 ; Reer & Krämer, 2017 ). There is agreement that more sociable people are more capable of making better use of the opportunities offered by SNS to strengthen their social network (Ross et al., 2009 ). For example, individuals not only can get all kinds of valuable support and help from their friends through using SNSs (Indian & Grieve, 2014 ; Wohn & Larose, 2014 ), but also can meet the needs of self-worth and self-integration and have relatively pleasant emotional experience (Wise et al., 2010 ). Therefore, SNSs use can improve their life satisfaction (Pang, 2018 ; Shahyad et al., 2011 ). Accordingly, those high self-esteem individuals may particularly perceive more positive feedback and life satisfaction when they present themselves honestly on SNSs than those low self-esteem individuals.

The possible moderation role of self-esteem, however, has not been fully explored in the previous research, we therefore examined it and hypothesized that positive self-presentation would be related to low sense of positive online feedback and life satisfaction, particularly for those low self-esteem individuals, whereas it would be weaker for those high self-esteem individuals (H3) and that honest self-presentation would be related to heightened sense of positive online feedback and life satisfaction, particularly for high self-esteem individuals, whereas it would be weaker for those low self-esteem individuals (H4).

In sum, as shown in Fig.  1 , we examined a moderated mediation model in which positive online feedback would differently mediate the different associations of different self-presentation with college students’ life satisfaction and self-esteem would differently moderate this mediating process as well.

Hypothesized model

Participants

Participants included 460 Chinese college students from one normal university located in eastern China. A priori power analysis with the G*Power 3 software package (Faul et al., 2009 ) indicated that the sample size that would provide an adequate power (0.95) and a moderate effect size ( f 2  = 0.15) at a 0.05 significance level (α) using a hierarchical regression analysis with 4 tested predictors would be 129 participants, and thus justifying this sample size. Forty students were excluded due to missing data or inaccurately completing the measures. Ultimately, 420 students completed the survey with a response rate of 91%. The final sample consisted of 244 (58.10%) females and 176 (41.90%) males aged from 18–24 ( M  = 20.23, SD  = 4.59). Among these students, 145 (34.52%) were freshman, 106 (25.24%) were sophomore, 80 (19.05%) were junior, and 89 (21.19%) were senior; 276 (65.71%) were from rural areas and 144 (34.29%) were from urban areas.

• Online self-presentation

Online self-presentation was assessed with nine items adapted from positive self-presentation and honest self-presentation scale (Kim & Lee, 2011 ) by Niu et al. ( 2015 ). The positive self-presentation subscale consists of 5 items, which is designed to evaluate how individuals selectively present positive aspects of themselves on SNSs (e.g., ‘‘I post photos that only show the happy side of me’’). The honest self-presentation subscale consists of 4 items that assesses the extent to which individuals honestly present their true selves on SNSs (e.g., ‘‘I don’t mind writing about bad things that happen to me when I update my status’’). All items were answered on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = ‘‘strongly disagree’’; 7 = ‘‘strongly agree’’). A higher averaged score indicated more positive/honest self-presentation on SNSs. The Chinese version of this scale has demonstrated good psychometric properties among Chinese college students (α = 0.82, 0.74; Niu et al., 2015 ). In the present study, the Cronbach’s αs for the two subscales were 0.85 and 0.79 respectively.

• Positive online feedback

Positive online feedback was measured using the positive online feedback scale adapted from Liu and Brown ( 2014 ). The scale is composed of 5 items (e.g., “When I update my status on SNSs”; “When I post photos on SNSs”) assessing how often participants received positive feedback on SNSs. All items were answered on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = “never”; 5 = “frequently”). The scale focuses on the overall frequency of positive online feedback rather than its level of positivity, as it is difficult for college students to determine the level of positive feedback (Liu & Brown, 2014 ). The higher the averaged score, the more frequently the participants were to receive positive feedback from friends while using SNSs. The Chinese version of this scale has demonstrated good psychometric properties among Chinese college students (α = 0.90; Jiang et al., 2019 ). The Cronbach’s α was 0.92 in the present study.

• Self-esteem

Self-esteem was measured by a revised Chinese version of Rosenberg ( 1965 ) Self-Esteem scale. The scale is composed of 10 items (e.g., “I am able to do things as well as most other people.”). Considering that the 8 th item in the scale is not suitable for measuring Chinese self-esteem due to cultural difference (Tian, 2006 ), only the remaining 9 items were used in the present study. They were answered on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = ‘‘strongly disagree’’; 4 = ‘‘strongly agree’’). A higher averaged score indicated a higher self-esteem. The Cronbach’s α of the scale was 0.90 in the current study.

• Life satisfaction

Life satisfaction was measured with six items developed by Wang and Shi ( 2003 ). The items (e.g., “How satisfied are you with your current life?”) were answered on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = “strongly disagree”; 7 = “strongly agree”) and then averaged to form an overall score of life satisfaction. The higher the averaged score, the higher of life satisfaction. In the current study the Cronbach’s α of the scale was 0.78.

Before the survey began, informed consent was obtained from participants, and the study plan was approved by the Scientific Research Ethic Committee at our university. All participants completed a series of anonymous questionnaires at their classrooms administered by well-trained psychological graduate assistants. The authenticity, independence and completeness of their answers as well as the confidentiality of the information collected were emphasized to all participants. It took approximately 15 min to complete all of the measures.

Data analysis

In the current study, data analyses were conducted using SPSS 22.0 and PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013 ). SPSS 22.0 was used to investigate the correlations among the main variables, and PROCESS macro for SPSS 22.0 to estimate the models. Then, four models were constructed. Among them, two models examined the mediation role of online positive feedback in the relationship between different online self-presentation and life satisfaction. Following MacKinnon’s ( 2008 ) four-step procedure, Hayes’ ( 2013 ) PROCESS macro (model 4) was used to estimate the mediating effect. The other two models used Hayes’ ( 2013 ) PROCESS macro (model 8) to tested the moderation role of self-esteem in the two mediation models. Specifically, the current study assessed the effects of moderation of self-esteem on the association of online self-presentation with positive online feedback and on the association of online self-presentation with life satisfaction. In addition, values at two levels of self-esteem ( M  ± 1 SD ) were used to calculate the simple slopes. All the variables involved in the analysis were standardized.

As suggested by Preacher and Hayes ( 2008 ), the present study used a bootstrap approach to decide the significance of the mediation of positive online feedback. Specifically, 5,000 bootstrapped samples and 95% bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs) were used in this approach. If the CI did not contain zero, the effect was seen as significant.

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations, and Pearson’s correlation coefficients for all study variables. As expected, the variables were all correlated with each other.

Testing the mediation model

Positive self-presentation as a predictor.

By the preliminary examining, all independent variables’ variance inflation factors were less than 2.00, therefore there was no multicollinearity.

The results (see Table 2 ) revealed that positive self-presentation was negatively related to both positive online feedback and life satisfaction, while the latter two were positively associated with each other. Then, the mediation test showed that the path from positive self-presentation to life satisfaction through positive online feedback was significant, ab  = – 0.19, Boot SE = 0.03, 95% CI = [– 0.24, – 0.13]. It indicated that positive online feedback partially mediated the relationship between positive self-presentation and life satisfaction but in the opposite direction. The mediation effect was – 0.19, accounting for 42.61% of the total effect.

Honest self-presentation as a predictor

To test another mediation model, the same procedure was used. As shown in Table 3 , however, we found that honest self-presentation was positively related to both positive online feedback and life satisfaction, while the latter two were positively associated with each other. Then, the mediation test showed that the association of honest self-presentation with life satisfaction through positive online feedback was significant, ab  = 0.22, Boot SE = 0.03, 95% CI = [0.17, 0.28]. It indicated that positive online feedback also played a partial mediating role in the relationship between honest self-presentation and life satisfaction with a mediating effect of 0.22, which accounted for 44.02% of the total effect.

Testing the moderated mediation models

As Table 4 illustrates, positive self-presentation was negatively correlated with positive online feedback, while self-esteem was positively linked with it, and the interaction between them was significant on positive online feedback as well, indicating a moderating role of self-esteem in the relationship between positive self-presentation and positive online feedback.

To better understand the moderation effect of self-esteem, Fig.  2 shows the plot of the association of positive self-presentation with positive online feedback at two levels of self-esteem ( M  ± 1 SD ). As shown in Fig.  2 , positive self-presentation was only significantly associated with positive online feedback for participants with high self-esteem ( β simple  = – 0.45, p  < 0.001), while not for those with low self-esteem ( β simple  = – 0.002, p  > 0.05). Although college students with high self-esteem received more positive feedback than those with low self-esteem ( t  = – 10.97, p  < 0.001), they would receive significantly decreased positive feedback when in high levels of positive self-presentation.

Moderating role of self-esteem in relationship between positive self-presentation and positive online feedback

On the other hand, positive self-presentation was negatively linked to life satisfaction, and its interaction with self-esteem was significant on life satisfaction as well, indicating that self-esteem also moderated the relationship between positive self-presentation and life satisfaction.

As shown in Fig.  3 , a simple slope test found that positive self-presentation was only significantly related to life satisfaction among college students with low self-esteem ( β simple  = – 0.21, p  < 0.001) while not among their counterparts ( β simple  = – 0.04, p  > 0.05). It indicated that participants with low self-esteem not only perceived less life satisfaction than those with high self-esteem ( t  = – 13.18, p  < 0.001), but also further perceived significantly decreased life satisfaction when in high levels of positive self-presentation.

Moderating role of self-esteem in relationship between positive self-presentation and life satisfaction

To test another conceptual model, the same procedure was used. The results (see Table 5 ) showed that honest self-presentation and self-esteem were both positively associated with positive online feedback and their interaction was significant on positive online feedback as well.

As shown in Fig.  4 , a simple slope test found that honest self-presentation was positively linked with positive online feedback either for college students with low self-esteem ( β simple  = 0.19, p  < 0.001) or for those with high self-esteem, ( β simple  = 0.57, p  < 0.001), but the latter slope was obviously higher. It indicated that college students with high self-esteem would particularly benefit from high levels of honest self-presentation to positive online feedback.

Moderating role of self-esteem in relationship between honest self-presentation and positive online feedback

On the other hand, honest self-presentation was positively linked with life satisfaction, and its interaction with self-esteem was significant on life satisfaction as well.

As shown in Fig.  5 , a simple slope test found that honest self-presentation was only significantly and positively related to life satisfaction among college students with low self-esteem ( β simple  = 0.17, p  < 0.001) while not among those with high self-esteem ( β simple  = 0.001, p  > 0.05). Although college students with low self-esteem perceived less life satisfaction than their counterparts ( t  = – 13.18, p  < 0.001), they would perceive significantly increased life satisfaction when in high levels of honest self-presentation.

Moderating role of self-esteem in relationship between honest self-presentation and life satisfaction

Although the association between online self-presentation and individual life satisfaction has been studied in previous research, it is yet unclear whether and how different strategies of self-presentation are related to life satisfaction differently. The current study answered this question by revealing the direct and indirect relationships between different self-presentation and life satisfaction through positive online feedback and the moderating effect of self-esteem on them.

In accordance with H1, the results showed that positive self-presentation was negatively related to college students’ life satisfaction whereas honest self-presentation was positively linked with it.

Although SNSs offer college students a platform to connect to known and unknown online friends, present their own information, and look for others’ information (Griffiths et al., 2014 ; Kuss & Griffiths, 2017 ), the so-called friends on SNSs not only overlap with the social circle in real life, but also involve some strange net friends. Therefore, some college students will try to create a positive image by presenting positive information selectively. When individuals present themselves positively, they deliberately hide negative information and filter their cognition of themselves, real life and future negative aspects (Wright et al., 2018 ). Such cognitive filtering that cannot reflect the real situation will hinder their self-integration and self-acceptance (Carson & Langer, 2006 ). In line with the self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987 ), this will lead to a greater self-discrepancy between the actual self and the virtual self, and then produce negative emotions (Grieve et al., 2020 ). Similarly, other studies have also indicated that a larger discrepancy between the real self and the ideal self will cause to greater psychological discomfort (Grieve et al., 2020 ; Heng et al., 2018 ), which further reduces their life satisfaction.

On the contrary, honest self-presentation seems to contribute to college students’ life satisfaction, as found in previous research (Kim & Lee, 2011 ). On the one side, it can be interpreted that individuals can present their real information and status on SNSs to carry out self-affirmation (Toma, 2013 ), thus obtaining social support (Ko & Kuo, 2009 ) and improving SWB (Bij de Vaate et al., 2019 ; Luo & Hancock, 2019 ). On the other side, according to the social penetration theory, honest self-presentation is beneficial for deepening interpersonal relationships, gaining interpersonal trust, and increasing social support (Lin & Utz, 2017 ; Sosik & Bazarova, 2014 ), which helps improve life satisfaction. As a result, when college students present themselves more authentically on SNSs, their life satisfaction is higher.

The mediating role of positive online feedback

Consistent with H2, we found that positive online feedback mediated the different relationships between different self-presentations and college students’ life satisfaction in different directions.

This is possible because when individuals present themselves positively rather than honestly on SNSs, other people may fail to form trust in them which will be unfavorable for their mental health and interpersonal relationship (Kim & Baek, 2014 ), whereas they will receive more positive feedback when they disclose themselves honestly even negatively (Bareket-Bojmel et al., 2016 ). While positive self-presentation may maintain a level of positive self-image, it hides the negative side of individuals, which may go against the development of deep intimate relationships and the acquisition of beneficial social support (Oh et al., 2014 ). Only when individuals seek support through disclosing themselves honestly, they can receive it with a great likelihood from online friends (Greene et al., 2006 ), and such support has been consistently shown to be positively linked to their SWB (Bij de Vaate et al., 2019 ; Luo & Hancock, 2019 ). While individuals hide behind a smiling online mask, it is difficult for them to acquire meaningful social support from online friends (Oh et al., 2014 ). Meanwhile, when individuals perceive less social support, their life satisfaction and overall SWB decrease, resulting in fewer positive emotions and more negative emotions (Kong & You, 2013 ). Therefore, when college students used more positive self-presentation on SNSs, they would perceive less positive online feedback, and thereby decrease their life satisfaction.

By contrast, because honest self-presentation is an individual’s real presentation on SNSs, which is sincere and open, it can help an individual reduce negative emotions or attitudes (Grieve & Watkinson, 2016 ), get more social support (Yang, 2014 ) and thereby improve life satisfaction (Chai et al., 2018 ) by showing one’s real side and sharing the current real situation. Although honest self-presentation may present negative information or attitudes about oneself, an individual’s unadorned and authentic presentation of information enables friends to perceive their current real situation, and thus provide their support and help more easily (Greene et al., 2006 ; Kim & Lee, 2011 ). As well, from the perspective of social penetration theory, honest self-presentation on SNSs can increase interpersonal trust and intimacy (Jian & Li, 2018 ), maintain interpersonal relationships and obtain social support (Ko & Kuo, 2009 ), and enable individuals to obtain emotional social support and social identification (Xie, 2014 ). Thus, honest self-presentation can enable college students to know themselves more objectively and clearly, perceive more positive online feedback, and then improve life satisfaction.

The moderating role of self-esteem

Partially consistent with H3, more positive self-presentation was found to be connected with less life satisfaction, only for those low self-esteem individuals, but associated with less positive online feedback only for those high self-esteem ones.

These findings partially supported the “poor get poorer” theory, which believes individuals with inadequate development resources in their real lives might erode their well-being through bad online experience (Selfhout et al., 2009 ; Snodgrass et al., 2018 ). They partially supported Higgins’s ( 1987 ) self-discrepancy theory as well, according to which people with low self-esteem will perceive larger differences between the real self and the ideal self when they present themselves positively but not honestly and thereby experience more dissatisfaction with themselves and their lives.

However, it is not the case for the results about positive online feedback. Several reasons can be considered. First, life satisfaction is a judgmental process that based on self-selected standards, which is greatly affected by the level of individual self-esteem. However, the frequency of positive online feedback is an objective component, which has little to do with individual experience/perception to some extent. Second, high self-esteem may be regarded as ostentation when individuals presenting excessive positive self, which will cause the audience’s disgust (Schlenker, 1980 ) and then lead to a significant decrease in positive feedback. By contrast, the audiences, particularly those who know the low self-esteem individuals, may relatively tolerate and encourage them when they present some positive information of themselves. Certainly, another possible explanation of the result about low self-esteem is that individuals with low self-esteem often look down on their own worth (Forest & Wood, 2012 ), and thus are not only more likely to perceive external rejection information (Zhou et al., 2018 ), but also more likely to perceive others’ behavior as rejection (Kashdan et al., 2014 ). They are also inclined to concentrate on concealing their perceived shortcomings and true feelings (Baumeister et al., 1989 ), which may hinder their social support seek and acquisition and thereby receive less positive feedback (Oh et al., 2014 ). Therefore, whether they have less or more positive self-presentation, the frequency of positive online feedback they received were always lower with no significant change, compared to their counterparts, as indicated in the present study. These results suggest that positive but not real self-presentation should be not good for everyone, but particularly for those low self-esteem individuals in terms of decreased life satisfaction and for those high self-esteem ones in terms of reduced positive feedback.

As well, H4 was partially supported. Honest self-presentation was found to be linked to high sense of positive online feedback despite the levels of self-esteem of participants, particularly for those high self-esteem individuals, but linked with more life satisfaction only for those low self-esteem ones.

These results seemed to partially support the hypothesis of “rich get richer”: because college students who have good social behavior are inclined to present more self-information on SNSs, and receive more positive feedback through honest self-presentation (Kraut et al., 2002 ; Reer & Krämer, 2017 ). Now it is widely believed that people who are more sociable make better use of the opportunities provided by SNSs to strengthen their social ties (Ross et al., 2009 ). In addition, individuals with low self-esteem usually have cognitive bias of rejecting information: they not only show less defense against negative information, but also accept more negative information (Zhou et al., 2018 ), which may discount the positive association of their honest self-presentation with perceived positive feedback to some degree. By contrast, people with high self-esteem play an active part in interpersonal communication (Sampthirao, 2016 ). Therefore, individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to get social feedback after their honest self-presentation on SNSs than their counterparts. Even so, more honest self-presentation on SNSs still brought significantly more positive feedback for those low self-esteem individuals.

However, the result about life satisfaction was not the case in that only low self-esteem college students benefited from their honest self-presentation while their counterparts did not. There may be several reasons. On the one side, according to the self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987 ), when those low self-esteem individuals honestly present themselves, they will experience small discrepancies between their true self-states and ideal self-states and less negative emotions, which helps improve their life satisfaction. More than that, they can be more clear about their self-concepts regarding social anxiety (Orr & Moscovitch, 2015 ) and honest self-disclosure which enables them to express themselves and buffer negative feelings (Kim & Dindia, 2011 ). On the other side, low self-esteem may be seen as an act of sincerity when low self-esteem individuals presenting more honest self on SNSs, which will help them receive the audience’s likes (Schlenker, 1980 ), which will further result in a noticeable rise in life satisfaction. By contrast, people with high self-esteem are very clear about and believe in themselves and their selves are relatively free of influence of external social appraisal (Wood & Forest, 2016 ). Moreover, because self-esteem acts as a “buffer”, people with high self-esteem do not fluctuate greatly in terms of emotional adaptation (Arndt & Goldenberg, 2002 ). Thus, high self-esteem individuals always perceive more stable and higher life satisfaction than their counterparts, as found in the present study. It is still important to point out that, however, low self-esteem individuals seemed to benefit more from honest self-presentation on SNSs in terms of increased life satisfaction.

Limitations and future directions

There still are some limitations in the current study. First, in line with previous research (An et al., 2020 ; Liu & Brown, 2014 ), we focused on the overall frequency of positive feedback without distinguishing the roles of different specific positive feedback (e.g., likes, positive comments, or caring emojis). Future research could further explore the different associations of more specific types of positive online feedback with people’s well-being. Second, we did not sufficiently address the possible impact of SNS usage time and the number of SNS friends on the current results. Future studies should consider them as control variables to obtain more comprehensive and convincing findings. Third, we used a series of self-report questionnaires which may yield inaccurate measures because participants’ answers on some items are easily affected by social desirability. Therefore, future research should take other methods into account, such as evaluations by others and content analysis of SNSs accounts of participants to better understand the association of different strategies of self-presentation of college students’ life satisfaction and to improve the findings’ ecological validity. Fourth, we used a cross-sectional design which can not draw any causal conclusion. Future designs could benefit by implementing experimental manipulations that directly facilitate participants’ interactions on SNSs to test more causal models between self-presentation and life satisfaction. Finally, we used a small sample coming from only one university in China which limited its representativeness and the generalizability of the findings. Future studies should recruit a more diverse sample to provide new evidence.

Conclusions and implications

The current study provides valuable information by highlighting the positive role of honest self-presentation and the strength of positive online feedback for everyone on perceived life satisfaction, as well as the important moderating effect of self-esteem. We found that different strategies of self-presentation on SNSs was differently linked to college students’ life satisfaction and positive online feedback was a crucial mediator in such relationships. We also found that honest rather than positive self-presentation on SNSs was conducive to life satisfaction, particularly for those low self-esteem ones.

These findings have potential practical implications as well. First, the findings suggest that honest rather than positive self-presentation would be a better choice for anybody on SNSs to improve life satisfaction. They are particularly instructive for individuals in a special period, such as a home isolation period for the prevention of COVID-19, who reduce real-world social connections and turn to Internet for happiness. Second, they may be especially meaningful for individuals who are in low self-esteem because presenting more honest selves will particularly benefit their life satisfaction. Certainly, promoting self-esteem should have more fundamental benefits for happiness.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed in this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

Not applicable.

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This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (No. 16BSH103).

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Tian, L., Zhai, R., Dai, P. et al. How different online self-presentations relate to life satisfaction differently in college students: The role of positive online feedback and self-esteem. Curr Psychol 42 , 25460–25475 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03444-w

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The Presentation of Self Online

Introduction.

Web users are engaging in computer-mediated self-expression in varying ways. The technology that enables this is developing fast, and how it does so is influenced by many more factors than just the needs of the people it touches. This chapter explores literature about the impact of computer-mediated self-expression on:

• people's everyday lives.
• individual self-expression and exploration.
• interactions and relations with others.
• interactions with and expectations of society and community.

We ground our discussion in established literature about non-digital self-expression and identity from the social sciences. This raises the key theme of individuals desiring control over how others see us, yet wanting to behave in a way that is authentic, or consistent with their internal identities. There is also emphasis on the collaborative and collective nature of identity formation; that is, our self-presentation fluctuates depending on the people we're with, the situation we're in, and norms of the society we're part of. The focus on face-to-face interactions and embodiment leads us to draw contrasts between online and offline experiences, and to look at the substitutes for the body in digital spaces.

The extent to which online and offline identities interact and overlap is hotly debated. Is creating an online identity a chance to reset, to reshape yourself as an ideal? Or are you simply using it to convey true information about what is happening in your daily offline life? Is it a shallow, picture of you, or a forum for deep self-exploration? How does the way one portrays oneself in digital spaces feedback to ones offline self-presentation? We explore these questions in section 3 .

Section 4 examines social media and blog use, including how one's imagined audience affects self-presentation in public, and how context collapse might occur when the actual audience is different to expected. There are several examples of techniques for managing who sees which 'version' of oneself, and the types of 'versions' of self that are commonly seen to be constructed on social media, and with what degree of transparency they are linked together. Most of the longitudinal studies in this space are of teenagers and young people, who have never known a world without social media, and who may incorporate it naturally and seamlessly into their daily practices, thus making it a core part of their identity during formative years. I draw a contrast between the relationship-driven architecture of contemporary social networking sites, and the more personal, customisable blogging platforms which preceded them. Studies of bloggers and blogging communities reveal some different priorities and habits than what is common practice today, and offer insight into how online self-presentation is evolving.

Throughout literature from both social and computer sciences, privacy is a common concern. In section 5 we look further at how tensions between users and the privacy settings of systems they use impact on personal information disclosure. Does self-censorship affect identity formation? How do people weigh up the risks and benefits of exposing themselves online? This is particularly pertinent for future systems development, as more and more people become aware of state surveillance, for-profit data collection, and their diminished rights over their personal data.

Finally we introduce the relatively new Web Science concept of Social Machines in section 6 in order to recapture the circular interdependencies between humans, technologies, and communities. We propose to build on current work of describing and classifying social machines to better account for the individual perspectives of participants.

Ultimately we posit that online is simultaneously a reflection, a distortion, an enhancement, and a diminishment of the offline world. They impact each other in complex ways, particularly with regards to self-presentation and identity formation. The various theories and studies described in this chapter form the basis for which we conduct the investigative and technical work in the remainder of this thesis.

My perspective on this review

I'd like to take a moment to note that whilst reading various studies about young peoples' reactions to and interactions with rapidly evolving digital technologies from the 2000s, it occurred to me that the subject of these studies is in fact my own age group. Some of the results are instinctively familiar to me; I was there, I experienced these things. Some are ridiculous. I don't know how my first-hand experience of growing up with technology (I was born in the same year as the Web, and my parents were early adopters) affects my reading of these studies, or my ability to study others' use of technology, but it is something I ponder.

Performing the self

The obvious place to start when embarking on a discussion about self-presentation is Goffman [ goffman1959 ]. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Goffman posits several, now well-established, theories using drama as a metaphor:

• Everyone is performing. The front-stage of our performance is what we create for others - the audience - to see, so that they may evaluate and interact appropriately with us.
• We also have a back-stage; how we act when there is no audience, or an audience of our team . Our team participate alongside and collude with us on the front-stage.
• Our performances have both conscious and unconscious aspects. That is, we consciously give information about ourselves to others in order to manage their impression of us, but we also unconsciously give off information that others may pick up on and take into account when deciding how to interact with us.
• Both actors and audiences are complicit in maintaining the cohesion of a situation. Performances break down if actors break character, deliberately or accidentally, or if there is a mismatch between parties' definition of the situation.

These theories emphasise the collaborative or social nature of self-presentation, and apply to face-to-face interaction.

Whilst Goffman's dramaturgy refers mostly to body language, a related theory is Brunswik's lens model [ brunswick56 , lens01 ], part of which suggests that individuals infer things about others based on "generated artifacts", or things left behind. In [ bedrooms02 ] this model is used to study how personal spaces (offices and bedrooms) affect observers' assessments of the characteristics of the owner of the space. This study links individuals to their environments by:

• self-directed identity claims (eg. purposeful decorations like posters or use of colour);
• other-directed identity claims (eg. decorations which communicate shared values that others would recognise);
• interior behavioural residue (ie. "physical traces of activities conducted within an environment");
• exterior behavioural residue (ie. traces of activities conducted outside of the immediate environment which nonetheless provide some cues as to the personality of the environment occupant).

Self-presentation is largely unconscious in the physical realm and comes naturally to most people. People may also use in-crowd markers (like a shirt with a band logo on) consciously to send certain messages to people who will recognise them, whilst not drawing any attention from people who won't [ boydfacid ]. Later in this chapter I look at how our presence in digital spaces fail and succeed to take the place of the physical body when it comes to interactions and identity formation.

https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/01/10/context-collapse-a-literature-review/

Social psychologists argue that we come to know ourselves by seeing what we do and how others react to us, and that through interaction, actors seek to maintain the identity meanings associated with each role (Burke and Stets 2009; Cooley 1902; Mead 1934). Indeed, Mead (1934) contends that for each role the actor plays, there is a separate Generalized Other, or larger moral understanding of who the person is and how the person is expected to be in the world, and that social actors manage their roles by adhering to disparate expectations as is situationally necessary. Similarly, Goffman (1959) demonstrates the skillful ways in which social actors reveal and conceal aspects of themselves for varying audiences, maintaining separate faces within distinct social arenas, while Leary (1995) discusses playing to each audience, their values, and their perceived positive opinion of the actor.

The self in context

By reflexively adjusting one’s perception of self in reaction to society, people construct their individual identity. [ boydfacid ]

Development of personal identity is not only something that happens internally. We are strongly influenced by feedback (conscious and unconscious) from others around us, as well as the particular setting and culture in which we find ourselves. How we react to things outside of our control in part determines our identity construction, and some people adjust their behaviour in response to feedback more than others [ snyder74 ]. Thus identity is socially constructed, and often is dynamically adjusted according to context [ boydfacid ].

(self-awareness is identity situated as in society.) A person's understanding of the context in which they are performing impacts their performance [boydfacid]. boyd argues that online, people find it much more difficult to evaluate this context, and thus run increased risk of performing inappropriately, or experience context collapse when multiple audiences are inadvertently combined. This is explored further in section 4 .

…. political, cultural, racial. stuff about web dissolving these [Turkle], but not really. [Kenny] study about people using identity language (with a corpus of terms that corresponds to culture/society), but in content not wrt themselves or in their profiles.

The project of the self

Giddens [ giddens84 ] looks at the relationship between macro and micro views of the world, acknowledging that broader effects of society impact individual behaviour, and vice versa, with neither one being the primary driving force. This suits well my ideas about online self-presentation, confirming the complex interplay between technological affordances, individual actions, and the place of both in a cultural and social context.

Giddens argues that self-identity is an aggregation of a person's experiences, an ongoing account, and a continuous integration of events. In contrast to Goffman's dramaturgy, Giddens downplays the role of an audience, and in contrast to Brunswik's lens theory, he downplays what we can learn from the traces someone leaves behind. Giddens argues that self-identity cannot be uncovered from a moment, but something which is ongoing, over time. Modern society, according to Giddens, affords us more freedom to create our own narratives to determine our self-identity. In the past, rigid social expectations dictated our roles for us. However, increased choices about what to do with ourselves may also increase stress and prove problematic. Awareness of the body is central to awareness of the self, as the body is directly involved in moments we experience in daily life. As we are now explicitly constructing a narrative about our identities, rather than having one ascribed to us by society, the self is an ongoing project which takes work to maintain [ giddens91 ].

The focus on explicit actions and decision making about self-presentation is pertinent when it comes to digital representations of identity.

Extending the self

Early to mid 20th century philosophers and social scientists complicate notions of the 'self' by combining it and extending it with our physical surroundings, and this view emerged long before the Web. Heidegger expresses technology as coming into being through use by a human; when tools are used the tool and its user do not exist as independent entities, but as the experience of the task at hand (using the example of a carpenter hammering, unaware of himself or his hammer) [ manhammer ]. McLuhan discusses media, literate and electronic, from the printing press and electric light to radio, TV and telephone, and its impact on how we communicate. He places communication technologies as simultaneously extensions of and amputations of our bodies and senses, which continuously and fundamentally re-shape the way we (humans) see and place ourselves the world [ mcluhan ]. More recently, Clark's Extended Mind Theory uses the example of a notebook as a means of externally processing information that would otherwise be carried out by the brain, drawing the external world in as party to our cognitive processes [ clarkmind ].

The next logical step is to consider how the modern digital technologies of Web and social networking can also be considered extensions of the self, and this is addressed in part by Luppicini's notion of Technoself [ technoself ]. Technoself incorporates (amongst other things) extension of the self through physical technology embedded in the body (cyborgology); in our changing understanding of what it is to be , as life is extended and augmented through advancing healthcare; but also in our relationships with our virtual selves. This is not a topic into which I will dive deeply from a philosophical standpoint, but the idea of the Web and online social networks as extensions to the self rather than as separate entities or concepts is worth bearing in mind as this thesis proceeds to explore the complexities of intertwined digital and offline identities.

maybe something to do with hyperreality, Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Offline to online… and back again

When people use digital technologies to communicate, they are passing a version of themselves through the filter of the platform they use. In this section I discuss the relationships between online and offline selves.

One might assume that the disembodied nature of the interactions lets people have more control over how they are "seen" by others; Turkle claims that it is "easy" to create and tweak a perfect self online [ Turkle2015 ]. In reality this control is affected by a great number of factors. Turkle writes that computer-mediated communication is predictable even in the ways it is unpredictable, and that people seek out this predictability in preference to face-to-face interactions, and in preference to facing emotional vulnerability. Turkle's argument assumes that we have full understanding and control of the digital systems we use and the audiences we are reaching through them. It presumes we know exactly how and where and when the data we input will be output in the short and long term, and how others will interpret it. given off by users as a side effect of scrolling, typing, tapping and clicking in their browser and mobile apps which is collected in the background by a plethora of third-parties. This generates a view of the individual that they may not even realise is being compiled, and over which they certainly have no control. Further, the affordances of the technical platform may dictate how a user is able to actively express themselves, or influence what they want to share on a subconscious level. We will discuss both of these issues in more detail later in this chapter. -->

Turkle's argument neglects that at every crossroad in these 'predictable' systems are stationed unpredictable humans, perhaps with conflicting interests and motivations, from the conception of a social system, to its realisation and use. Turkle has been studying for decades how people explore, experiment and find themselves through technology, and her overriding narrative is of a desire to express an idealised version of the self; one that is not subject to any interpretation other than what the expresser desires. However, as discussed further in the next section numerous studies of social media users find a variety of other types of motivation for participation.

Keen [ digitalvertigo ] on the other hand emphasises the risks that individuals become trapped by technology of which they have neither understanding nor control. Being swept up in cultural technology trends, social media users may unwittingly become "prisoners" of a carefully curated digital "hyperreality", the importance of which supplants their offline lives. Similarly, [ inreallife ] suggests that "fantasy gets in the way of real progress" when it comes to self improvement, but studies only examples of "catfishing", where individuals create exaggerated online profiles in order to deliberately mislead potential romantic interests. The idea that the online self replaces rather than supplements the offline self also misses the nuances of how and why people use social media in the first place. Nonetheless, I agree that online worlds are certainly not just a mirror of the offline.

On the contrary, not only are online identities some form of reflection of offline identities, but the inverse can be true as well. In ethnographic studies of teenagers' use of mobile apps for socialising, it is reported that crafted online personas both reflect and feed back into teenagers' true sense of self [ appgen ]. Numerous studies from the field of psychology, reported in [ infinitereality ], demonstrate various ways in which playing a role online or in a virtual world reflects back and directly changes people's offline behaviour. Avatars can be used to build confidence and reveal suppressed personality traits. Relatedly, study participants who were asked to interact from behind avatars which conveyed different appearances of age, race, and body type expressed affinity with these previously unfamiliar experiences, and responded differently in personality evaluations before and after. A longitudinal study of teenage girls roleplaying online, a process through which they developed their identity through narrative, revealed positive impacts on their confidence, through new friendships [ youth ].

There is a long history of assessments of online interactions which proclaim that the self-centered nature of social media makes people narcissistic, that competition for reputation isolates us [ digitalvertigo ], and that the construction of an ideal self or facade is damaging, especially to young people. However, [ appgen ] argues that narcissism is not created by the Web, but enabled by it, as an existing need for validation is more readily satisfied.

Several studies [ insta17 , Rousseau17 , haferkamp10 ] find that people's self confidence or body image drops after viewing the online profiles of people who appear to be more attractive or more successful than them. [ wellbeing17 ] explains that passive use of social media is what appears to have a negative impact on people, whereas active use has a positive effect on well-being. This is shown in several studies, including [ toma10 ], which explores the beneficial effects of browsing one's own Facebook profile; [ nemer15 ] which discusses how selfies can empower marginalised communities; and [ noland06 ] which finds a positive impact on self-esteem of teenaged girls who engage in "auto-photography".

It is also worth bearing in mind that experience in the virtual world can cause physical reactions - laughter, tears - and the virtual and the physical blur together in the subject stream of experiences, adding to an identity which is made of virtual and physical events blended together [ youth ].

Authenticity and integrity

In an interview, Facebook founder Zuckerberg said that "having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity" [ fbeffect ]. This received public backlash at the time, and on several more occasions as Facebook and other social networking sites imposed real name policies, sometimes linked to an official ID [ boyd2012politics ]. This removes a level of identity control which many people take for granted. A particularly clear example can be seen in the reaction of a community of drag queens who were used to being able to interact online using chosen names. Real name requirements removes a vital aspect of fluidity from their interactions, glossing over the seams which provide poignant performance material and a route towards a group identity [ lingel2015face , barmann14drag ]. Additionally the requirement for real names and the ability to report 'fake names' became a mechanism whereby a marginalised group could be harassed and silenced [ hotmess2015selfies ]. In general, an attitude that people should be happy to connect all of their identities together under a single legal name is an expression of social privilege: a result of having no features or proclivities which are socially censored.

Sandberg, whilst COO of Facebook in 2012, commented that profiles as detailed self portraits is a "shift towards authenticity" [ digitalvertigo ], but her organisation's notion of 'integrity' as a single complete version of oneself that is the same no matter to whom one is presenting is somewhat at odds with authenticity. Neither are people "intraviduals", caught between competing identities as claimed by Conley in 2009 [ conleyintra ], but expressing aspects of themselves appropriately and according to context. This is behaviour which we have already established via Goffman as ordinary offline, and so shouldn't be considered unusual online. One's 'authentic' self-presentation may be partial or moderated and no less genuine for that. Indeed, some individuals find they are more able to express their authentic selves online than they are offline due to oppression or social expectations which are disjoint from their core values.

However, in highly commercialised or competitive online environments, 'authenticity' is a quality to strive for, to maintain an audience. A Web search for 'authenticity on social media' will reveal a plethora of guides on how to craft an 'authentic' persona, how to maintain personal-but-not-too-personal ties with one's audience so that they see that you're just like them. For individuals who set out to explore and express their identity online, this can be a tricky world to navigate [ duffy15b ]. True authenticity in online communities is seen as disjoint with self-promotion and celebrity; popularity implies a reduction in authenticity, perhaps linked to 'selling out' or 'pandering' to an audience [ donathboyd04 , ellison07 ]. Whereas authenticity is often seen from an outside perspective as always something manufactured, an idealized reality [ Marwick2010 ].

The idea that online spaces are under control of their owners suggests others may be suspicious of their authenticity [ tong08 ] but reinforcement of social identity from others can counteract this. Warranting theory describes how information that appears to be outside of the subject's control—for example, a message posted publicly by a friend on someone's profile—can reinforce the trustworthiness of the other profile data to an outside observer [ warrant , warrant1 , warrant2 ].

"strive to be honest and honerable" [inreallife]

Dishonesty and deception

"Some argue that distinct contexts are unnecessary and only encourage people to be deceptive. This is the crux of the belief that only those with something to hide need privacy." - [ boydnp10 ]

Most people like to consider themselves to be quite honest in their communications with friends, family and acquaintances. However, even honest people routinely modulate what they share, omitting and sometimes falsifying information in order to reduce social friction, avoid confrontation, defuse awkward situations, or to save face [ buller1996interpersonal , burgoon1989maintaining ]. Hancock et. al. introduced the term butler lies to refer to a common use of simple lies to manage communications, such as smoothly exiting from an unwanted conversation [ hancock2009butler ]. Online, the notion of who our 'friends' are has become increasingly blurred and difficult to define. In such settings, people commonly navigate different social spaces, projecting and varying self-presentation according to the ways they want to be perceived by each [ marwick2010TweetHonestly ].

Whilst part of tailoring one's presentation to an audience is the ability to carry out some level of deception , with personal communications, there is an implicit expectation of authenticity [ aoki2005Ambiguity ]. However, online, the need to navigate multiple and uncertain audiences means that we may constantly vary our self-presentation. Authenticity becomes a social construct derived from the social context and how we wish to be perceived by a given audience [ boyd2002faceted ]. We may be deceiving, at least to some extent, nearly constantly without even being conscious of it.

Deception has long been studied, both within and outwith the HCI community. Traditionally, deception has been cast in a negative light [ bok1978lying ], to be used only if no other option is available. In the 1980s, however, communications researchers began to investigate the positive aspects of lying, in particular white lies - socially acceptable lies which cause little or no harm to the recipient [ camden1984WhiteLies ].

In 1992, McCornack cast deception as an understandable response to complexity: "[r]esearchers studying deception recently have begun to argue that deceptiveness is a message property that reflects a kind of functional adaptation to the demands of complex communication situations" [ mccornack1009InformationManipulation ]. People then manipulate the information which they share as a necessary part of participation in society. This has led to recent work on the positive aspects of deception in human computer interaction, in particular how butler lies are used to ease social situations [ hancock2009butler ], and how systems can deceive their users for beneficial reasons [ adar2013Benevolent ].

Several different taxonomies of lying and deceptive behaviours have been proposed [ camden1984WhiteLies , depaulo1996lying , lindskold1983categories ]; Anolli et al. examined a family of deceptive miscommunications, including self-deception and white lies [ anolli2001DeceptiveMiscommunication ]. They look at omission of relevant information, concealment using diversionary information, falsifaction and masking with alternative, false information. Of particular interest is their claim that "a deceptive miscommunication theory should be included in a general framework capable of explaining the default communication", that is that deception should not be seen as a psychologically different activity than 'normal' communication. This tallies with the earlier approach of McCornack [ mccornack1009InformationManipulation ] who situates deceptive messages within the spectrum of information manipulation . This, combined with the lens of Gricean conversational maxims, allows for an explanation of deceptions where some of the truth is told, but information which the speaker knows is relevant to the listener is omitted or obscured [ grice1970logic ].

Motivations for lying have also been extensively studied in social psychology. Turner et al.'s taxonomy included saving face ; guiding social interaction; avoiding tension or conflict; affecting interpersonal relationships; and achieving interpersonal power [ turner1975information ]. Camden et. al. [ camden1984WhiteLies ] develop a detailed categorisation of lies to do with basic needs, managing affiliation with others, self-esteem and miscellaneous practices such as humour and exaggeration.

Many malicious or undesirable behaviours are facilitated by the ability to create and alter identities. Astroturfing [ cho2011astroturfing ] has become common online [ zhang2014astroturfing ], with corporations and governments employing sophisticated identity management software to carry out large scale operations. Possibly the most famous of this is the 50 Cent Party , hired by the government of the People's Republic of China to post favourable comments towards party policy [ fiftycent ]. On a smaller scale, sock-puppets — multiple accounts controlled by a single person — are used to skew ideas of consensus and distort discussion in online societies, leading to attempts to automatically identify such accounts [ bu2013sock , solorio2013case ]. Personas can be constructed for the purpose of trolling , whether it is overtly offensive in order to cause outrage or more subtle manipulation to trick people into wasting effort or taking caricatured positions, and correlations have been shown between enjoyment of trolling and everyday sadism [ buckels2014trolls ].

Many of these activities are a form of obfuscation , in some way hiding the truth, polluting the data pool and diminishing trust. The ethical issues here are complex and contextual, with the viewpoints of different actors having considerable divergence [ brunton2011vernacular ].

Another strand of research borrows from information warfare, to look at the possibilities for disinformation. Disinformation tactics are most useful when a channel of information cannot be completely closed, but can be rendered useless by being filled with incorrect, but plausible, assertions in order to lower its overall signal-to-noise ratio [ wiki:disinformation ]. The intended target of the lie may not be the official recipient of the message: lies can be directed at those who are eavesdropping on the communications channel or surveilling the participants [ alexander2010Disinformation ]. Techniques used include redaction to remove parts of the message, airbrushing to blur parts of the message and blending to make the message similar to other plausible messages, as well as other forms of information distortion [ alexander2010Disinformation ].

In chapter 3 I carry out two studies which aim to bring together these general theories of deceptive behaviour with a closer look at how and why people might engage in them online.

Networked publics

Social media technologies blur the boundaries between private and public, and this affects identity performance. Ten years ago, boyd hoped that educators and technologists would succeed in easing the cultural transition for young people into the networked era [ boyd-sns07 ]. She describes social networking sites as a type of "networked publics", technologically-mediated spaces where people can virtually go to interact with their friends, and where they may be subject to observation or interjection by passers-by. Differently to offline public spaces, online publics may be persistent, scalable, searchable, replicable, and/or have invisible audiences. These features of networked publics affect how people express themselves and interact, however they do not directly dictate participants' behaviour [ boydnp10 ]. Networked publics are not only spaces, but collections of people or "imagined community"; different publics can serve different purposes, but can also intersect with each other [ boyd2014s ].

"Networked publics must be understood in terms of “publics,” a contested and messy term with multiple meanings that is used across different disciplines to signal different concepts ... In short, I contend that networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies; they are simultaneously a space and a collection of people ... My approach accepts the messiness and, instead, focuses on the ways in which networked technologies extend and complicate publics in all of their forms ... publics that have been transformed by networked media" [boydnp10]

Over subsequent years, boyd and many others proceed to explore the effects of these differences on those who engage with online social media to different degrees. In this section I recount some of these studies and findings.

A benefit of participation in networked publics is that a wider variety of communities are accessible than offline. Niche identities don't have to be set aside to fit in [ appgen ]. Online interactions are "not simply a dialogue between two interlocutors, but a performance of social connection before a broader audience" [ boyd2014s ]. boyd looks specifically at teenagers in networked publics, who she says have sought online spaces in recent years as they are not allowed to 'hang out' any more in physical spaces like malls [ boyd2014s , marwickdrama14 ].

cues by social partners affect observers' impressions of the profile owner. Profiels offer interactive and static features and are complicated by input of others. Less control by initiator.

"Comments are not simply a dialogue between two interlocutors, but a performance of social connection before a broader audience. " [boydnp10]

[modern American] teens create their own publics. Digital spaces because they're not allowed in physical ones (like malls). Being themselves, to see and be seen. "What makes a particular site more or less public is... how it is situated within the broader social ecosystem." [boyd2014s]

performance in public. 'drama' as a defense mechanism for teens. Saving face, get attention, manipulate perceptions of others. Larger audience than school halls. distinguish from adult-defined practices like bullying, so for autonomy and control. elicit support. [marwickdrama14]

reconceptualise audiences as co-present and participatory. misalignment potential increases with SNS. [baym12]

change from bi to unidirectional connects as norm with Twitter. asymmetrical disclosure. reinforces weak ties, lowers barrier to communication. [ellison13]

First I reflect on the digital substitutions for the physical body in online social interactions. Then, in comparing and contrasting 'old school' style blogging with contemporary (circa 2013-2017) social networking sites I look deeper into how differences in technological affordances impact peoples' interactions and self-expression.

Audiences for identity performance as well as the context in which the performance takes place are critical, but online both of these may be unknown or dynamic, or both. I'll introduce work around imagined audience and context collapse, both of which pioneer our understanding of identity behaviours in networked publics. When audiences and contexts are known, we can examine how people connect with others and form communities; in the final section I look at trust, social reinforcement of identity, and studies of what social media participants choose to disclose or conceal.

Unfortunately, networked publics appear to reproduce many of the biases that exist in other publics-social inequalities, including social stratification around race, gender, sexuality, and age, are reproduced online (Chen and Wellman, 2005; Hargittai, 2008). Political divisions are also reproduced (Adamic and Glance, 2005)" [boydnp10]

humans are reduced into packages of information... digital is separate from true humanness [digitalvertigo]

Profiles and embodiment

In Faceted Id/entity [ boydfacid ], boyd highlights several differences between self-representation offline compared to online. Embodiment is a key factor in self-presentation and she claims that there is considerable difference between performing one's identity through appearance, eg. fashion and body language, when walking into a room, compared to explicitly describing oneself by entering attributes and other personal information into an online form to create a profile. The disembodied nature of online interactions means that people must find new ways to express themselves, and manage the impressions other people have of them, or "a new type of body" [ youth ]. A lack of control over one's online self presentation is compounded by the inability to visualise - or perhaps even be aware of - the data that is collected by the systems we use. Online activities are logged over time to an extent that most individuals are not aware of; these activities, an individual's expressions given off (Goffman), are used, largely unknowingly, for the commercial benefits of third parties; this constitutes a kind of implicit or unconscious profile. boyd suggests that visualising all of one's personal information that is available online, as well as visualising one's 'audience' or social network connections, would provide an individual with better awareness of, and so better control over, their online image. In boyd's prototype interfaces, users are explicitly asked for personal data in order to build a profile of themselves, and boyd does point out the problematic nature of this, compared with the unconscious or implicit identity performance one conducts in offline social settings.

Counts in [ counts09 ] explores the impact of profile attribute selection on self presentation, and finds that upon completing the values for 10 attributes, participants converge on their "ideal" representation of themselves. This study also finds that free-form attributes are better than ones with preset choices for participants' satisfaction with how they have portrayed themselves. This study does not take into account that most online profiles are created in a particular context, with a particular purpose in mind. Asking participants to express their ideal self-presentation 'in general' vastly oversimplifies reality. Participants are not told who the consumers of the profile they are creating are expected to be, or how it is to be presented; nor are participants given an opportunity to indicate who their expected audience is or what they think the profile is for.

Since boyd's prototypes were designed, social media gained widespread popularity. Most, if not all, mainstream systems request input of explicit personal data to build an initial profile, despite the discord of this activity compared with offline identity expression. However, unlike in boyd's prototypes, it doesn't stop there. Such systems encourage ongoing engagement through adding and messaging contacts with various degrees of publicness, creating status updates to broadcast a current situation, production of creative media content, and feedback on content and updates created by others. As we will see in chapter 3 , contemporary social media builds one's profile from various combinations of these online activities, and typically use far more than the explicit data entered by the user to generate a representation of a person. This increases the likelihood that individuals may not have an accurate impression of what this representation looks like to others.

Expression through avatars, design, visuals - pull from blogging and sns studies

Recent studies confirm that visuals are a key part of expressing identity online. Many focus on selfies as a modern substitute for the body [ vanhouse11 , lasen15 , senft15 , frosch15 ], but [ bunnies17 ] examines self-presentation through other kinds of photos. Examples include humorous images from popular culture or photographs of other things with an overlayed caption, coupled with a tag (eg. #currentstate) that indicates the poster relates to this concept; as well as photos of items that people carry with them day to day. In [ papatwit12 ], self-expression is performed through use of Twitter hashtags, and [ food15 ] suggests that food photography is a means of self-presentation.

Pointing at something and saying that one has chosen it as self-representative makes the assemblage of tags, text, and image a culturally intelligible self-representation [ bunnies17 ].

A lack of embodiment can also have a distinct advantage. In [ stendal12 ] several studies of people with disabilities who use online social systems are reviewed, and reveal findings about increased control over disclosure of disability (which may not be possible offline) and reduced isolation when people are able to interact online.

Beyond simply visualising all of one's personal information, and the connections between social network contacts to show how personal data may flow through a network, boyd suggests that these visualisations can be used to actively segregate one's contacts along parameters which correspond to one's personal information, permitting an individual to perform identity more appropriately in digital spaces. However in practice, designing user interfaces for this proves to be challenging. For one, people aren't used to explicitly thinking about audience and context, so dividing their contacts up this way is not natural.

Transparency of the collection of any of this data, and control over how it is distributed are key to boyd's thesis of how to empower individuals online. Sadly, the situation here has not improved in the intervening years. Indeed, private corporations are collecting more and more personal data through free social networking sites, and granting the subjects zero rights with regard to access or distribution. Later in this chapter we elaborate on how privacy concerns impact online disclosure and profile creation behaviours; in chapter 3 we build on the existing literature with an empirical study of a community of hackers intent on decentralised and personally-owned data storage as a means to greater control.

Next we look more closely at the behaviour of users of Social Network Sites, of which "profiles" are a key feature [ boydsns07 ].

Social Network Sites

In 2007 boyd and Ellison defined Social Network Sites (SNS) to be Web-based, bounded, public or semi-public, and afford creating and viewing connections with or between other users [ boydsns07 ]. They note that users of these systems tend to connect with others with whom they already have a 'real life' social relationship, and present a fairly thorough history of SNS from 1997 onwards, which I won't recount here. This definition is pertinent to this thesis due to its emphasis on profiles, implying self-presentation, as a core feature of SNS. In 2013 they updated their definition to incorporate different types of content and data into profiles; to de-emphasise the traversal of connections (as this became more important to machines than humans); and to emphasise participants' interaction with streams of user-generated content [ ellison13 ]. I will proceed to focus on case studies and experiments which were carried out since these definitions, and due to the rapid pace of change in this area, prioritise those from the last four years.

SNS have: profiles, friends lists, public communication, stream-based updates." [boydnp10]

Many studies of identity formation on social media focus on young people and teenagers. One reason is because this is a crucial point in life for understanding oneself and asserting a personal identity. Other studies approach teenagers as somewhat alien "digital natives", born into a world of social technology which is expected to fundamentally change how they interact with the world compared with older generations, who don't or can't distinguish between online and offline [ borndigi ]. I will relate the results of these studies, but note that I disagree with the notion of a "digital native" because being born in a particular year or even raised around modern technology does not automatically give one a natural instinct for identity expression in digital spaces, and not even necessarily more opportunity to experiment and reflect than older SNS users [ boyd2014s ].

Digital communication technologies can help or hinder identity formation. The App Generation [ appgen ] provides a balanced argument between the pros and cons of teenagers socialising through mobile applications. They find that some applications provide a "prepackaged identity" for users to adopt rather than encouraging experimentation. The affordances of applications shape the forms of expression that are available, and so identity formation is in a way controlled by the application designer. Born Digital [ borndigi ] suggests that teenagers experiment with identity online, but aren't fully aware, or don't care about, the traces that are left behind when they do so.

In some cases, for example fan communities, self-presentation shifts between a more playful fictional identity performance, and an identity which is closer to 'real life' [ baker09 ]. In others, such as professional self-presentation, individuals lean on automatically generated metrics by the system they use to convey a positive image, with gamification or commodification of the self becoming commonplace [ academicqs16 ]. When SNS provide a platform for professionalising passions such as content creation, [ duffy15 ] notes that participants may be even more vulnerable to the consequences of performing and maintaining one's self-presentation in an exposed online space, as well as the "labour of visibility" that goes into it.

Most people occupy multiple roles offline, find ways to establish and maintain boundaries between them, and continue to do so to different degrees when taking representations of these roles to online spaces. SNS increase the permeability of boundaries, but users employ various tactics to manage their identity when a one-identity-per-person model is imposed on them [ quinn15 ].

[ singh15 ] describes how Twitter users subvert features of the system to express themselves in new ways, as well as reflecting on how changes to the functionality of they system affect how people use it. This supports [ papatwit12 ] which, through content analysis of trending hashtags, also describes how people work around technical constraints of Twitter to meet their self-presentation needs.

Even in the early days of SNS (specifically Facebook) beginning to rise to popularity when use was overflowing into the workplace, the access control settings offered by Facebook were considered too complicated to enable most people to realistically manage connections with both professional and personal contacts from a single profile, despite the potential advantages of connecting with colleagues through the platform [ DiMicco07 ]. More recently, we see that SNS users manage tensions between their multiple roles and the affordances of systems by segregating their audience across multiple platforms. The interview study in [ Zhao16 ] found that sharing decisions across multiple sites are made primarily based on the known audiences of the different sites, and the content being shared. This study also recounts previous work on motivations for using different SNS, including to connect with old friends, and share pictures, which feed into decisions taking regarding content sharing. A similar study found that family was a crucial audience to whom more private sharing was desired [ Farnham11 ], and findings in [ Vitak14 ] indicate that Facebook users desire to re-asssert their offline boundaries when online, and concurs that managing this through the tools that Facebook provides is cost-intensive. Facebook itself compounds this issue by using identity information as a "social lubricant" which encourages people to make new connections [ ellison11fb ].

In Alone Together, she says people are reduced to profiles

is definition from [ellison13] still good?

A social network site is a networked communication platform in which participants 1) have uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied content, content provided by other users, and/or system-provided data; 2) can publicly articulate connections that can be viewed and traversed by others; and 3) can consume, produce, and/or interact with streams of user-generated content provided by their connections on the site.

Blogging and personal homepages

Personal homepages and blogs have been around for considerably longer than SNS, though remain a comparatively specialist practice. It is widely accepted that blog or website owners have more control over their online space than do users of SNS, [ intlblog , markus06 ], including freedom to innovate with the site's appearance and thus explore more individualistic aspects of the online self [ alist05 ]. Relatedly, communities of bloggers are not owned or controlled by a single entity [ dennen09 ].

Through observations of over 200 blogs within a particular community and semi-structured interviews with 40 bloggers, [ dennen09 ] identifies five aspects which affect how bloggers build their identity: name and blog title; descriptive attributes; post content; voice; affiliations; and visual design. All of these are subject to change over time, and sometimes major offline transitions can cause a shift to a new pseudonym or blog altogether; often the audience is invited along however. Blogs are often designed to reinforce community norms, to enhance a sense of belonging; as a result, the community develops and evolves its own identity, which in turn influences how newcomers choose to present themselves. Bloggers' contributions are fragmented across different domains, and where their writing style and topics constitute a part of their identity, so it fragments their identity.

Blogging communities are traditionally more accepting of pseudonyms but [ dennen09 ] notes that distrust is not of other community members, but rather of personally-known community outsiders who may accidentally stumble across blog entries.

"homepages became an important site of identification, as early web users posted biographies, photos, and entertaining links for viewers who surfed to their page (Döring, 2002) [ellison13]"

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Brunswik's lens model which describes a way in which identity can be constituted through physical traces left behind. This model has also been used to understand how observers make personality judgments about people based on the traces left in their digital space , ie. personal homepages [ gosling08 , markus06 , vazire04 , papacharissi02 ].

The importance of themes and designs of blogs and homepages is emphasised by [ dennen09 ], who mentions that whilst some blog consumers use a feed reader to receive new content from the blogs they are interested in, they often click through to the original post to view it in the context of the author's own space.

On the other hand, [ blogdesign ] takes a snapshot of a random sample of blogs in 2003 and maps the state of the blogosphere through analysing visual elements in depth and tracking commonalities. The conclusion is that significant customisation of blog templates was in fact relatively rare, with most people only slightly tweaking colours or adding custom images. A likely explanation for this is that bloggers lacked the technical expertise to do so.

Studies of blogging communities outside of the US demonstrate that blogging is not a uniform practice that can be understood as a whole [ intlblog ]. Certain communities (in this case, Muslim ones) which are seen by outsiders as homogeneous use blogging to highlight their uniqueness and individuality. Others (for example in China) emphasise their ethnicity and culture as a key part of their identity. Blogs from the Paris Banlieues in fact had a direct impact on how the mainstream media portrayed their plight; an example of how personal identity expression in networked publics was able to affect a broader social understanding of that identity. The overriding message from these studies is cultural taboos and offline societal context affect narrative about identity, and this is reflected online.

[papa04blog] is a content analysis of blogs, and suggests that self expression through blogging is spontaneous

Imagined audience

The audience to whom one performs is critical in forming the context in which one is performing [ boydnp10 ]. On SNS, people are often expressing themselves to multiple audiences simultaneously. When people are aware of this, they take different strategies when it comes to navigating what they share; individuals with many followers on Twitter practiced self-censorship (only posting things they are happy for the worst-case audience to read) and practicing coded communication (strategically targeting some posts at some audience members, and others at others, to maintain overall interest) [ Marwick2010 ].

However, given the many possible ways in which Tweets can be discovered and consumed ([ Marwick2010 ] questioned people who post publicly) it is virtually impossible to determine the actual audience for one's content. Thus, people imagine who their audience is likely to be, and express themselves accordingly. Obviously these imaginings, which may stem from understanding of the affordances of a particular platform, or a particular community or topic of discussion, impact how people express themselves online.

[ litt12 ] theorises about how the imagined audience is synthesised, and draws in Giddens' structurational framework, noting a combination of macro- (social roles, technical affordances) and micro-level (individual motivations, technical skills) factors. [ litt12 ] ultimately concludes that asking people about their imagined audience is prone to errors or misinterpretations, as imagined audience is a concept which is both difficult to measure and difficult to express.

Relatedly, as people perform in networked publics, they must contend with a "networked audience," who are not connected only with the performer, but also with each other [ Marwick2010 ].

Context collapse

I have so far discussed how people attempt to map boundaries from their offline lives into their online interaction spaces, and the notion of imagined audience. Context collapse occurs when boundaries come down and personas intended for different audiences are merged [ Marwick2010 ]. The consequences of this may range from slight social awkwardness, to direct breaches of privacy and potential danger, and have been examined in a variety of different circumstances, such as [ daviscontext , contextwesch , duguay14 , duguay13 ].

Thanks to the properties of networked publics such as searchability and persistence, contexts may also collapse when information is consumed later, or through a different systems, whereby it may be interpreted differently by the consumer than how it was originally intended [ boydnp10 ].

As we look forward to how SNS and online self-presentation in general will evolve, we must consider how the lines people have drawn around their contexts are tethered to particular (versions of) systems. What happens when these systems change, merge, or disappear? As designers of new systems, we must be cognisant of the role technical affordances play in creating, enabling, and destroying social boundaries.

Everybody knows I’m a dog

"While once viewed as a set of technologies built in resistance to the ugliness of the dot-com era, social media is now intertwined with neoliberal capitalism and data surveillance" - [ boyd15 ]

We are rapidly moving into a world where information about nearly every aspect of our lives is becoming sensed, recorded, captured and made available in digital form. Data is captured and shared voluntarily, as tools invite ever more intimate participatory surveillance [ albrechtslund2008Participatory ]. While the abundance of information traces has unlocked a wide range of new kinds of applications (eg. [ Akker:2014:TRP:2684563.2684638 , Consolvo:2008:ASW:1357054.1357335 ]), the creation and potential for disclosure poses new threats to individual privacy and autonomy. The overall lack of transparency by manufacturers regarding how they are capturing and handling personal information has created a heightened sense of unease among many, in addition to the potential threats dealing with their unintentional disclosure or misuse [ fife2012privacy , metzger2004privacy , featherman2010reducing ].

Various data and surveillance scandals involving private companies and governments [ dcent , crit12 ] that gained media attention mean that awareness of surveillance and personal data collection is growing amongst the general public. There are many studies examining peoples' awareness of and attitudes towards privacy and surveillance on SNS, but I will not detail them here. During studies in the 1990s, Westin defined three categories to describe how ordinary people feel about privacy: "pragmatists", "fundamentalists" and "unconcerned." Privacy pragmatists accept that there may be tradeoffs between benefits to information sharing and the intrusiveness of requests for information. Fundamentalists distrust organisations which request personal data. The unconcerned are comfortable with sharing personal data with organisations in exchange for services [ krane2002privacy ]. Westin found, prior to the Web becoming mainstream, that approximately half of the general public are pragmatists; just over half of the remainder are fundamentalists, and a minority are unconcerned. Suffice it to say that people do care about privacy, and are just finding new ways to manage it [ boydnp10 ], contrary to what certain tech executives might claim [ zuckpriv , googpriv ]. My main concern in terms of this thesis is how privacy infringement might impact presentation of self. We have already seen that online identity performance may alter a general understanding of oneself, which reflects in the offline world. So I must ask: when people self-censor online due to privacy concerns, how does this stifle self-expression, and in turn impact internal identity construction?

Furthermore, implications of our online sharing decisions affect more than just ourselves; "interpreted selves" are created by recognising patterns across millions of people [ boydpriv12 ].

There is often an asymmetry about the collection and use of data. To take a relatively prosaic example, Facebook introduced 'read receipts' on messaging, which indicate when a user has seen a message. This feature has been shown to cause anxiety when present in email systems, as users seek to maintain their responsiveness image , the impression which they project to others about how they respond to input and partition their attention [ tyler2003can ]. Once ambiguity about attention has been removed, a whole class of white lies - 'The internet was bad, I couldn't check my messages' - are no longer possible, and people develop alternative strategies, such as not opening messages until they feel prepared to respond. The key difference in the context of SNS is that the user does not have the same degree of control over the channel - email receipts can be switched off, but SNS offer different levels of control.

The social aspects of privacy relate to what DeCew terms expressive privacy - a freedom from peer pressure and an ability to express one's own identity [ decew1997pursuit ]. Nissenbaum's contextual integrity [ nissenbaum2004privacy , nissenbaum2009privacy ] seeks to understand "appropriate sharing", looking at the ways in which flows of information are governed by norms, which may be easily violated as technological systems repurpose and share data.

"I argue that privacy is simply in a state of transition as people try to make sense of how to negotiate the structural transformations resulting from networked media. ... just because people are adopting tools that radically reshape their relationship to privacy does not mean they are interested in giving up their privacy. " [boydnp10]

From licloud paper background:

Deception in the age of pervasive surveillance

We are rapidly moving into a world where information about nearly every aspect of our lives is becoming sensed, recorded, captured and made available in digital form. Increasingly, every app on our smartphones, wirelessly connected devices in our homes, and on-body worn sensing devices are capturing what we do in unprecedented detail. Dodge and Kitchin \cite{dodge2005codes} introduced the term \emph{capta} to cover the data about us which are selected and captured as we go about our lives. In addition, vast amounts of data are captured and shared voluntarily, as tools invite ever more intimate \emph{participatory surveillance} \cite{albrechtslund2008Participatory}. While the abundance of information traces has unlocked a wide range of new kinds of applications~(eg. \cite{Akker:2014:TRP:2684563.2684638} \cite{Consolvo:2008:ASW:1357054.1357335}), the creation and potential for disclosure poses new threats to individual privacy and autonomy. The overall lack of transparency by manufacturers regarding how they are capturing and handling personal information has created a heightened sense of unease among many, in addition to the potential threats dealing with their unintentional disclosure or misuse\cite{fife2012privacy, metzger2004privacy, featherman2010reducing}.

There is often an asysmmetry about the collection and use of data. To take a relatively prosaic example, Facebook introduced `read receipts' on messaging, which indicate when a user has seen a message. This feature has been shown to cause anxiety when present in email systems, as users seek to maintain their \emph{responsiveness image}, the impression which they project to others about how they respond to input and partition their attention~\cite{tyler2003can}. Once ambiguity about attention has been removed, a whole class of white lies---`The internet was bad, I couldn't check my messages'---are no longer possible, and people develop alternative strategies, such as not opening messages until they feel prepared to respond.

The key difference in the context of social networks is that the user does not have the same degree of control over the channel---email receipts can be switched off, while social networks offer different levels of control. In response, a spectrum of tools and practises have emerged to re-introduce attentional privacy in messaging systems (see Section \ref{sec:existing-tools}).

Beyond sensing and storing this information, these apps and devices often disclose it, such as to the app or product's manufacturer's cloud data services, or to third-party companies and services for marketing and other purposes.

For those wanting to not be tracked, the two primary options available: try to suppress the amount of information being shared, or discontinue their use altogether. In practice, however, neither option is feasible or effective; first, the ever-increasing and varied ways people are now being tracked means that people are hardly aware of how they are being tracked to begin with. For example, most end-users have little awareness of the information being captured about them by their smartphone apps~\cite{mylonas2013delegate, wetherall2011privacy}. Second, many of the tools that track people are so vital to their everyday work or social activities that discontinuing their use is simply not practical~\cite{} . Finally, suppressing or falsifying information given to services only works insofar as that information is both manually supplied and inessential to delivering the provided services. Since people's greatest concerns surround information automatically sensed and captured, such as a person's physical location or activities, suppression may simply be impossible. With the promise of further Internet-connected `smart' sensors becoming increasingly invisible, the problem of even knowing where embedded in the environment these devices are may simply become impossible.

In contrast, a different strategy to suppressing information is the use of \emph{disinformation}, in which false information is strategically added to an information channel to discredit and draw attention away from true information that could not be suppressed~\cite{}. Such strategies have been used heavily in wartime by various counterintelligence agencies in order to reduce the damage of leaked sensitive information~\cite{alexander2010Disinformation} \ToCite{CVDazzle? Similar stuff?}. While such measures may seem extreme, they are, the concept of disinformation is quite simple. In this paper, we hypothesise that that, when applied selectively and appropriately in contexts, the use of disinformation, like other forms of deception, can be made to benefit end-users, system designers, and even those who are disinformation targets.

We are rapidly moving into a world where information about nearly every aspect of our lives is becoming sensed, recorded, captured and made available in digital form. Data is captured and shared voluntarily, as tools invite ever more intimate participatory surveillance \cite{albrechtslund2008Participatory}. While the abundance of information traces has unlocked a wide range of new kinds of applications~(eg. \cite{Akker:2014:TRP:2684563.2684638} \cite{Consolvo:2008:ASW:1357054.1357335}), the creation and potential for disclosure poses new threats to individual privacy and autonomy. The overall lack of transparency by manufacturers regarding how they are capturing and handling personal information has created a heightened sense of unease among many, in addition to the potential threats dealing with their unintentional disclosure or misuse~\cite{fife2012privacy, metzger2004privacy, featherman2010reducing}.

Many tools have been dedicated to helping people carry out various kinds of digital deception for the purpose of protecting their privacy. Without aspirations of comprehensiveness, we mention some here. Tools for masking identity are currently available for all levels of the software stack, from tools like \emph{tor} for masking the origin and destination at the network level~\cite{dingledine2004tor}, to privacy-enhancing features at the browser level. Such browser features include \emph{Do Not Track}~\cite{tene2012track}, user-agent spoofing, and tracker and cookie-blocking capabilities~\cite{eckersley2010unique}. At the application level, anonymous e-mail re-mailers~\cite{gulcu1996mixing}, anonymous e-Cash and cryptocurrencies~\cite{casale2015cryptocurrencies}, and anonymous secure file sharing systems~\cite{scarlata2001responder} have started to support certain activities offering guarantees of privacy under specified conditions.

The commoditised self

Social systems which involve content creation (like YouTube) or knowledge generation (like Wikipedia) are commonly seen as cooperative communities, whose participants generate value both for each other and also for the organisation behind the system. In [ vand09 ], van Dijck et. al. contest several uncritical manifestos for the business and communal interests of revolutionary Web 2.0 peer-production. They point out that seemingly open co-creation platforms are still profit-driven commercial entities. These entities do not provide tools out of benevolence, but in order to harvest metadata about their users, which they can process and resell. The balance of power between individuals and corporations is not swinging back towards the individual, as proponents of user-generated content sites claim, but the illusion is created that it is.

Users of systems often have little understanding of how their activities are being exploited - or nudged [ vand09b ]. Even as users are empowered by technology to create media, products, or services they desire, [ vand09b ] calls into question their agency when participants are being used and manipulated by commercial entities under the guise of community formation or participatory culture. [ dbeer08 ] describes SNS profiles as "commodities, both produced and consumed." In more recent years, awareness of this fact has spread. A popular refrain from advocates of less commercial alternatives is that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product." 1 , 2 , 3

In a similar vein to the previous section, we must also wonder about the impact of external commercial and economic forces which shape the tools and systems people are using to express themselves online. As a contrast, in the second half of this thesis, I focus on decentralised systems, which are potentially much less likely to exploit user metadata for profit.

The ghost in the (social) machine

Social Machines are systems for which the human and computational aspects are equally critical. In most cases, humans do the creative work whilst machines do the administrative tasks [ Timbl1999 ]. Up to now, systems have not been designed to be Social Machines; rather, the concept and definition of a Social Machine is derived from observations of existing (usually Web-based) systems. Many are products of the contemporary social web, on many different scales and in many different domains, often evolving, responding to technological and social developments, and interacting with each other [ Hendler2010 , ByrneEvans2013 , DeRoure2013 , Strohmaier2013 ]. Social Machines can be identified within and across social media networks, within and across online communities, and within and across technological spaces.

Social Machines are pertinent to our work here as they provide a lens through which we can examine sociotechnical phenomena which emphasises the interdependence between humans and technology. In studies of social networks discussed previously in this chapter, humans are considered as users of systems, and discussions focus around how people react to technology, how people behave in the context of particular technical or social constraints, or how people's lives are changed in response to their interactions with and through digital environments. It is important to also reflect upon the ways in which technology evolves or is reconceptualised as a result of passive (mis)use and active (mis)appropriation by humans. We similarly must recognise technical systems in the wider context of society, and include in our dialogue the developers who design and build technical systems, the organisations and legal entities which finance and drive them, and the cultural and economic climate in which they are situated.

Social Machines which have been studied so far have been described and categorised in terms of purpose [ DeRoure2013 ], motivations and incentives, technology used, goals and processes, quality assessment of outputs, and user participation and interaction [ Smart2014 ]. The emphasis in this work is on discussing Social Machines in collective terms; that is, 'a' Social Machine - wherever its boundaries happen to have been drawn (so far these boundaries are typically drawn around the edge of a "service" [ Smart2014 ]) - is considered as a coherent whole. The circumstances of the individual human participants not been given extensive consideration. For any given Social Machine, individual participants are diverse and participate in different ways, with varying goals, motivations and outcomes. As we have seen through studies of social media mentioned previously, they manipulate their online presence(s) so that they may behave in different ways according to different contexts, or may work together to construct a single image controlled by multiple people [ Dalton2013 ]. Such behaviour impacts our understanding of roles, autonomy and awareness, incentives and attribution, and accountability and trustworthiness of participants. Overlooking unique individual perspectives when observing a Social Machine as a whole can cause incorrect assumptions, for example: believing that participants who lie about who they are have negative intentions in a Social Machine whose overall "purpose" is to strengthen social ties. We must also bear this in mind when designing systems, so that a system may grow in response to unexpected actions of participants rather than hampering their explorations.

I argue that due to the complex nature of online identity, understanding nuanced individual behaviours of participants in a more granular way is crucial for Social Machine observation. I advance this argument in the next chapter through an empirical study of a Social Machine centered around creative media production.

Conclusions

Present day social media has dramatically increased participation in publishing and sharing online content. Easy-to-use services lower the barrier to entry for connecting with and pushing thoughts out to an audience. Identities expressed through social media are inherently collaborative; every interaction is pushed to a network, and part of a dynamic cycle of consumption and creation feedback. Commenting on someone else's post automatically links the post to your own profile, and often it appears there as well, accessible from two different contexts. Yet SNS permit little customisation, providing preset options for content or reaction templates, and consistent inflexible designs for profile pages. This tips the balance away from the individual aspect of identity construction performed by bloggers in the earlier years of the Web. Yet blogs and personal homepages are left wanting for a dynamically constructed and low barrier to entry network, which impedes the collaborative aspects of identity construction.

People manage shortcomings with the affordances of both blogging platforms and SNS in different ways—contending with invisible audiences and collapsed contexts, as well as reduced expectations of privacy—through carefully crafted personas, strategically omitting or amending the information they post online, or simply using different platforms for different purposes. We see that there are a multitude of factors which affect people's presentation of self online, which vary according to broader cultural or technological contexts, as well as personal motivations and abilities.

Along with their updated definition of SNS mentioned earlier, [ ellison13 ] calls for social media scholars who are studying individuals or communities online to systematically describe the technology in which their participants are situated, and the practices of the users. Technologies are changing rapidly still, so studies which are a snapshot in time can be linked to a broader discourse or overview, and remain relevant as time progresses, if they situate themselves appropriately. One way of accessing this bigger picture is through an organising framework that helps to record the background state of the environment being studied, and so surfaces connections between work that is otherwise perhaps not directly comparable [ vand09b ]. In chapter 3 I use several studies of my own on diverse identity behaviours across various social network sites in order to propose such a framework.

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Self-Presentation in the Digital World

Do traditional personality theories predict digital behaviour.

Posted August 31, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

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• Personality theories can help explain real-world differences in self-presentation behaviours but they may not apply to online behaviours.
• In the real world, women have higher levels of behavioural inhibition tendencies than men and are more likely to avoid displeasing others.
• Based on this assumption, one would expect women to present themselves less on social media, but women tend to use social media more than men.

Digital technology allows people to construct and vary their self-identity more easily than they can in the real world. This novel digital- personality construction may, or may not, be helpful to that person in the long run, but it is certainly more possible than it is in the real world. Yet how this relates to "personality," as described by traditional personality theories, is not really known. Who will tend to manipulate their personality online, and would traditional personality theories predict these effects? A look at what we do know about gender differences in the real and digital worlds suggests that many aspects of digital behaviour may not conform to the expectations of personality theories developed for the real world.

Half a century ago, Goffman suggested that individuals establish social identities by employing self-presentation tactics and impression management . Self-presentational tactics are techniques for constructing or manipulating others’ impressions of the individual and ultimately help to develop that person’s identity in the eyes of the world. The ways other people react are altered by choosing how to present oneself – that is, self-presentation strategies are used for impression management . Others then uphold, shape, or alter that self-image , depending on how they react to the tactics employed. This implies that self-presentation is a form of social communication, by which people establish, maintain, and alter their social identity.

These self-presentational strategies can be " assertive " or "defensive." 1 Assertive strategies are associated with active control of the person’s self-image; and defensive strategies are associated with protecting a desired identity that is under threat. In the real world, the use of self-presentational tactics has been widely studied and has been found to relate to many behaviours and personalities 2 . Yet, despite the enormous amounts of time spent on social media , the types of self-presentational tactics employed on these platforms have not received a huge amount of study. In fact, social media appears to provide an ideal opportunity for the use of self-presentational tactics, especially assertive strategies aimed at creating an identity in the eyes of others.

Seeking to Experience Different Types of Reward

Social media allows individuals to present themselves in ways that are entirely reliant on their own behaviours – and not on factors largely beyond their ability to instantly control, such as their appearance, gender, etc. That is, the impression that the viewer of the social media post receives is dependent, almost entirely, on how or what another person posts 3,4 . Thus, the digital medium does not present the difficulties for individuals who wish to divorce the newly-presented self from the established self. New personalities or "images" may be difficult to establish in real-world interactions, as others may have known the person beforehand, and their established patterns of interaction. Alternatively, others may not let people get away with "out of character" behaviours, or they may react to their stereotype of the person in front of them, not to their actual behaviours. All of which makes real-life identity construction harder.

Engaging in such impression management may stem from motivations to experience different types of reward 5 . In terms of one personality theory, individuals displaying behavioural approach tendencies (the Behavioural Activation System; BAS) and behavioural inhibition tendencies (the Behavioural Inhibition System; BIS) will differ in terms of self-presentation behaviours. Those with strong BAS seek opportunities to receive or experience reward (approach motivation ); whereas, those with strong BIS attempt to avoid punishment (avoidance motivation). People who need to receive a lot of external praise may actively seek out social interactions and develop a lot of social goals in their lives. Those who are more concerned about not incurring other people’s displeasure may seek to defend against this possibility and tend to withdraw from people. Although this is a well-established view of personality in the real world, it has not received strong attention in terms of digital behaviours.

Real-World Personality Theories May Not Apply Online

One test bed for the application of this theory in the digital domain is predicted gender differences in social media behaviour in relation to self-presentation. Both self-presentation 1 , and BAS and BIS 6 , have been noted to show gender differences. In the real world, women have shown higher levels of BIS than men (at least, to this point in time), although levels of BAS are less clearly differentiated between genders. This view would suggest that, in order to avoid disapproval, women will present themselves less often on social media; and, where they do have a presence, adopt defensive self-presentational strategies.

The first of these hypotheses is demonstrably false – where there are any differences in usage (and there are not that many), women tend to use social media more often than men. What we don’t really know, with any certainty, is how women use social media for self-presentation, and whether this differs from men’s usage. In contrast to the BAS/BIS view of personality, developed for the real world, several studies have suggested that selfie posting can be an assertive, or even aggressive, behaviour for females – used in forming a new personality 3 . In contrast, sometimes selfie posting by males is related to less aggressive, and more defensive, aspects of personality 7 . It may be that women take the opportunity to present very different images of themselves online from their real-world personalities. All of this suggests that theories developed for personality in the real world may not apply online – certainly not in terms of putative gender-related behaviours.

We know that social media allows a new personality to be presented easily, which is not usually seen in real-world interactions, and it may be that real-world gender differences are not repeated in digital contexts. Alternatively, it may suggest that these personality theories are now simply hopelessly anachronistic – based on assumptions that no longer apply. If that were the case, it would certainly rule out any suggestion that such personalities are genetically determined – as we know that structure hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 20 years.

1. Lee, S.J., 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.

2. Laghi, F., Pallini, S., & Baiocco, R. (2015). Autopresentazione efficace, tattiche difensive e assertive e caratteristiche di personalità in Adolescenza. Rassegna di Psicologia, 32(3), 65-82.

3. Chua, T.H.H., & Chang, L. (2016). Follow me and like my beautiful selfies: Singapore teenage girls’ engagement in self-presentation and peer comparison on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 190-197.

4. Fox, J., & Rooney, 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.

5. Hermann, A.D., Teutemacher, A.M., & Lehtman, M.J. (2015). Revisiting the unmitigated approach model of narcissism: Replication and extension. Journal of Research in Personality, 55, 41-45.

6. Carver, C.S., & White, T.L. (1994). Behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: the BIS/BAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(2), 319.

7. Sorokowski, P., Sorokowska, A., Frackowiak, T., Karwowski, M., Rusicka, I., & Oleszkiewicz, A. (2016). Sex differences in online selfie posting behaviors predict histrionic personality scores among men but not women. Computers in Human Behavior, 59, 368-373.

Phil Reed, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Swansea University.

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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Online self-presentation strategies and fulfillment of psychological needs of chinese sojourners in the united states.

• 1 School of Overseas Education, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
• 2 Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

This study statistically analyzed survey data to examine the relationship between fulfillment of psychological needs of 223 Chinese sojourners in the United States and their online self-presentation strategies on Chinese and American social media. The results showed that the combined use of proactive and defensive self-presentation strategies on Chinese social media instead of American social media were more effective to fulfill the sojourners’ need for autonomy. Moreover, presentation strategies that helped to meet the sojourners’ need for relatedness were significantly different between Chinese and American social media. Specifically, a proactive strategy was more effective to meet sojourners’ need for relatedness on Chinese social media, while a defensive strategy was more effective to fulfill their need for relatedness on American social media.

Introduction

Self-presentation is the core concept of American sociologist Irving Goffman’s Dramaturgy . As an individual’s role-playing behavior of self-expression in interpersonal interaction, self-presentation provides an impetus for self-promotion in real life ( Goffman, 1959 ). Western social psychologists have tested and revised the Goffman’s theory ( Jones and Nisbett, 1971 ), and the impression management theory (IMT) has been developed, which suggests that people apply a series of strategies (such as modification, concealment, and decoration) to control others’ perception of themselves as impression decoration or self-presentation.

With social media widely involved in people’s daily lives, there have appeared an increasing number of studies that are based on the theories of Dramaturgy and the self-determination theory (SDT), analyzing the relationship between online self-presentation behavior and the fulfillment of psychological needs. Online self-presentation is an important part of online social interaction and is influenced by multiple factors such as individual psychology, social context, and social culture. For instance, self-enhancers will selectively choose only positive life events and favorable personal information to share with their social network friends, but other people may entail presenting both positive and negative aspects of the self on social media to reveal their true feelings ( Lee-Won et al., 2014 ; Bareket-Bojmel et al., 2016 ).

In terms of self-presentation and need for relatedness, for example, Deters and Mehl (2013) pointed out that the active self-presentation on Facebook can reduce loneliness; Pittman and Reich (2016) found that compared with text-based platforms, social media users’ presentation on image-based platforms significantly reduced loneliness due to their enhanced intimacy with others. In terms of self-presentation and the need for autonomy, since a more multidimensional space for self-determined behaviors is provided in social media ( Reinecke et al., 2014 ), people can freely present their true selves without being affected by the outside world, therefore meeting their needs for autonomy ( Chen, 2019 ). For immigrants or sojourners, studies have found that they are more inclined to fulfill their autonomy needs through self-presentation on ethnic social media ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 ; Lim and Pham, 2016 ; Pang, 2018 ; Hofhuis et al., 2019 ). Additionally, proactive self-presentation strategies were found to be positively related to the maintenance of psychological well-being ( Swickert et al., 2002 ; Kim and Lee, 2011 ; Ellison et al., 2014 ; Stieger, 2019 ), and in order to obtain more social support, people need to keep a balance between the use of selective and authentic presentational strategies ( Bayer et al., 2020 ).

The psychological effect of online self-presentation has attracted more and more academic attention. However, these studies still remain inconclusive as how people fulfill their psychological needs by means of online self-presentation behavior in intercultural contexts. Specifically, most studies of sojourners are conducted in unitary contexts, either in sojourners’ ethnic social media environments or the social media of the host country, ignoring sojourners’ co-performance in dual-cultural contexts. Moreover, with the growth of the scale of Chinese sojourners, an increasing number of studies have been aimed at them, yet most have focused more on acculturation problems than online self-presentation behaviors. However, online self-presentation has gradually become an important behavior mechanism for Chinese sojourners’ acculturation and communication under the increasing influence of social media. Therefore, it is necessary to fill in the gaps in current research has left and to investigate the logical relationship between the online self-presentation and fulfillment of psychological need of Chinese sojourners in China and America’s dual-cultural contexts.

As important members of intercultural communication groups, Chinese sojourners in the United States are in the dual-cultural contexts of Chinese and American social media, thus they are ideal research participants. In view of this, this study focuses on the following questions:

RQ 1: Do Chinese sojourners mainly use Chinese or American social media to fulfill their psychological needs?

RQ 2: What kinds of presentation strategies are more effective in fulfilling Chinese sojourners’ psychological needs in dual-cultural contexts?

The purpose of this research is to study the logical relationship between online self-presentation strategies and the fulfillment of psychological needs (for autonomy and relatedness) of Chinese sojourners in the context of American and Chinese cultures and to further understand the characteristics of the psychological effects of Chinese sojourners’ online self-presentation behavior in intercultural contexts, so as to provide a new and resourceful way of thinking about maintaining Chinese sojourners’ mental health, as well as helping them to acculturate and communicate more effectively.

Participants and Procedure

This study focused on Chinese sojourners, who are mainly distributed on the east and west coasts of the United States. However, due to factors, such as the uniqueness of sojourners’ identity and their mobility, it is not possible to verify the official statistics on the population data. Therefore, the sampling method used in this study was a nonrandom sampling, and we were utilizing snowball sampling approach to recruit participants.

To be specific, our study initially chose Chinese overseas students, visiting scholars (college teachers and Confucius Institute teachers), and Chinese with a working visa in Washington state in the northwest of the United States as the main sample groups. We applied “Wenjuanxing” (wjx.cn), the most commonly used online questionnaire platform, to send out our questionnaires to people we knew in these three sample groups. We asked them to fill out the questionnaires and distributed the questionnaire link to their interpersonal social networks, including the WeChat groups of Chinese students studying in the United States and visiting scholars in American Colleges and universities, as well as online communities of local American Chinese. Following these procedures, we collected a snowballing sample of 300 questionnaires with responses.

In order to further reduce the error, the study carefully checked the responses to the 300 questionnaires; 29 questionnaires that did not indicate the use of both Chinese and American social media were excluded from the total sample, leaving 223 questionnaires as statistically valid. According to the data analysis of the demographic characteristics of the sample (see Table 1 ), a total of 135 female and 88 male sojourners participated in the survey. In terms of age, they ranged from 17 to 60 years of age, and the number of people aged between 21 and 30 was the biggest (120 people); there were 211 sojourners who had lived in the United States for 1 year or more.

Table 1 . Descriptive statistics for demographic characteristics of participants.

Finally, based on the data collected, this study performed a descriptive statistical analysis of self-presentation strategies and psychological needs on Chinese and American social media followed by a regression analysis of the two main variables.

Self-presentation strategies and the fulfillment of psychological needs were two major variables in our questionnaire, and both of them were measured with multiple items that were modified from established scales ( Lee et al., 1999 ; Partala, 2011 ; Chen, 2019 ).

Self-Presentation Strategies

Although there were differences in the classification of self-presentation strategies in the field of psychology at the microlevel, the self-presentation strategies could still be divided into two categories: proactive strategies and defensive strategies ( Goffman, 1959 ; Arkin et al., 1980 ; Tedeschi and Melburg, 1984 ; Fiske and Taylor, 1991 ). Based on this dichotomy and the self-presentation tactic scale developed by Lee et al. (1999) , as well as our empirical observation of Chinese sojourners’ online self-presentation behavior in the United States, this paper specified six presentational tactics, namely “posting selected photos,” “expressing humorous and close content,” and “displaying discipline” for proactive strategies, aimed at actively shaping and maintaining an ideal image and, “expressing controlled feelings,” “self-taunting,” and “reporting only good news” for defensive strategies, aimed at preventing others from depreciating or belittling one’s image. These tactics were measured with six statements; responses were captured on a 5-point Likert scale from “1-never use” to “5-use almost every time.”

Psychological Need Fulfillment

Our measure of the fulfillment of need for autonomy was based on scale for the satisfaction of psychological needs on social networking sites developed by Partala (2011) and was specified with the statements “I feel that my choices express my ‘true self’” and “I have a say in what happens and can voice my opinion.” To measure the fulfillment of need for relatedness, we adapted existing measures of need satisfaction ( La Guardia et al., 2000 ; Ryan et al., 2006 ; Partala, 2011 ) to the intercultural context on social media. Specifically, sojourners mainly maintained and developed three types of relationships in the intercultural context: the relationship with relatives and friends in their home country, the relationship with co-nationals or immigrants of the same cultural background, and the relationship with the locals in the host country ( Lim and Pham, 2016 ; Hofhuis et al., 2019 ; Liu and Kramer, 2019 ). Based on the existing research, this study divided the needs for relatedness of Chinese sojourners in the United States into three categories: first, relational need with domestic relatives and friends, which was stated as “I feel close and connected with my domestic relatives and friends”; second, relational need with Chinese Americans, which was stated as “I feel a sense of contact with Chinese Americans”; third, relational need with Americans, which was stated as “I feel a sense of contact with Americans.” Responses were captured on a 5-point Likert scale from “1-totally disagree” to “5-totally agree.”

In order to understand the basic identity characteristics of Chinese sojourners, this study designed demographic characteristics variables, including “gender,” “age,” “marital status,” “education level,” “time to the United States,” “daily social media use time.” On this basis, this study designed a set of scale to evaluate the online self-presentation behavior of Chinese sojourners in the United States from the overall level. The scale consists of three parts: demographic information, self-presentation strategy, and psychological need fulfillment. Responses were captured with 5-point Likert scales, except for demographic characteristics. Since WeChat and Facebook were the two social media that are most frequently used according to our preliminary study on Chinese sojourners’ general use of social media, this paper chose WeChat and Facebook as the main platforms to observe and analyze the self-presentation behavior of the sojourners. On the basis of quantitative research, this study conducted interviews with 18 Chinese sojourners from all the respondents to understand the logical relationship between self-presentation strategies and fulfillment of psychological needs on Chinese and American social media.

RQ 1: Do Chinese Sojourners Mainly Use Chinese or American Social Media to Fulfill Their Psychological Needs?

In order to answer this question, this study conducted a descriptive statistical analysis of the questionnaire data, and the results are shown in Table 2 . We first calculated the average score of the respondents’ psychological needs on social media in China and the United States and then used a t -test to compare the difference of the average scores between Chinese and American social media. As for “the fulfillment of the need for autonomy,” the results showed that the average score of Chinese social media was significantly higher than that of American social media at the level of 1%, indicating that the self-presentation behavior of Chinese social media was more effective for the fulfillment of Chinese sojourners’ need for autonomy.

Table 2 . Fulfillment of the needs for autonomy and relatedness in American and Chinese social media.

In terms of “the fulfillment of the need for relatedness,” the average score of American social media was significantly higher than 3 (a score of 3 represents neutrality), indicating that the development of a relationship with Americans through online self-presentation was significant. In Chinese social media, the average score of “maintaining the relationship with domestic relatives and friends” was significantly higher than 3 at the level of 1%, indicating that Chinese social media had a significant impact on the relationship with family and friends back in China. As for maintaining a relationship with American Chinese, the average score of Chinese social media was significantly higher than that of American social media at the level of 1%, suggesting that the Chinese social media could promote the relationship between sojourners and American Chinese more effectively than American social media.

RQ 2: What Kinds of Presentation Strategies Are More Effective to Fulfill Chinese Sojourners’ Psychological Needs in the Dual-Cultural Contexts?

In order to test the relationship between online self-presentation strategies and the fulfillment of psychological needs, this study further applied a regression analysis after controlling the demographic characteristics of sojourners such as gender, age, marital status, education level, years in the United States, and time spent on social media. The specific regression model was as follows:

Among them, the dependent variable Effect represented the fulfillment of psychological needs (autonomy and relatedness) brought by the online self-presentation behaviors of the Chinese sojourners, and the independent variable Strategy represented the self-presentation strategies including “posting selected photos,” “expressing humorous and close content,” “displaying discipline,” “reporting only good news,” “expressing controlled feelings,” and “self-taunting.” The control variables included the sojourners’ gender ( Gender ), age ( Age ), marital status ( Marriage ), education level ( Education ), length of stay in America ( Years ), and hours spent on social media daily ( Time ). Table 1 illustrates the descriptive statistics for the above demographic characteristics of participants in our regression.

We have found in Table 2 that Chinese sojourners’ self-presentation behavior on Chinese social media is more effective in fulfilling their need for autonomy. Therefore, we conducted a regression analysis on the relationship between the presentation strategies adopted by the sojourners on Chinese social media and their need for autonomy (see Table 3 for the research results). It was found that all six presentation strategies can significantly promote the fulfillment of the sojourners’ need for autonomy but that there are differences in the effectiveness of these strategies. Specifically, for the autonomy dimension of “expressing one’s true self,” the strategy with the most obvious effect was the proactive strategy “expressing humorous and close content,” while for the autonomy dimension of “voicing one’s opinion,” the strategy with the most obvious effect was the defensive strategy “expressing one’s controlled feelings.” It could be seen that in the context of social media in China, the combination of proactive and defensive strategies played a more positive role in meeting the need for autonomy. Through offline interviews, the results of quantitative analysis were further supported. Interviewees have said that the presentation strategy of “expressing humorous and close content” played an important role in arousing emotional resonance and expressing one’s true self; while for important events in personal or social life, using the defensive strategy of “expressing one’s controlled feelings” was more helpful for sojourners to voice his or her opinion in an objective stand and build an intercultural image with the ability of reflection.

Table 3 . The effect of different self-presentation strategies on the fulfillment of the need for autonomy in Chinese social media.

The empirical analysis in this paper had shown that the self-presentation behavior was effective in fulfilling sojourners’ need for relatedness in both Chinese and American social media. In order to investigate the differences between presentation strategies used in Chinese and American social media, this paper then conducted a regression analysis of the two platforms’ presentation strategies and fulfillment of sojourners’ needs for relatedness.

For Chinese social media, panel A in Table 4 shows that except “reporting only good news,” the other five presentation strategies have positive effects on maintaining the relationship between sojourners and their domestic relatives and friends. However, there were differences in the effectiveness of these strategies in fulfilling such a need, specifically, the proactive strategies of “expressing humorous and close content” and “displaying discipline” were comparatively more effective in fulfilling sojourners’ need to maintain domestic relationships. Similarly, the results in panel B shows that only the two proactive strategies of “displaying discipline” and “expressing humorous and close content” played an active role in maintaining the relationship between sojourners and Chinese Americans. It could be seen that the self-presentation on Chinese social media, whether to meet the relational needs with domestic relatives and friends or with Chinese Americans, was more effective by adopting proactive presentation strategies. The results of offline interviews further supported the quantitative research results. Interviewees said that “expressing humorous and close content” played an important role in maintaining the relationship with domestic relatives and friends, and this strategy could help them to narrow down the emotional distance with their relatives and friends back in China. At the same time, interviewees often expressed humorous and close content in the WeChat group of “Fellow Countrymen Association,” so as to promote the emotional connection with Chinese Americans. Also, interviewees considered as it necessary to present their “principled” side on Chinese social media and pointed out that “forwarding + commenting” was the most effective way to show the principle. Interviewees said that the strategy of “displaying principle” could help them to shape their self-image of self-discipline, self-reliance, and maintenance of their own cultural identity, thus strengthening the connection with their domestic relatives, friends, and Chinese Americans.

Table 4 . The effect of different self-presentation strategies on the fulfillment of the need for relatedness in Chinese social media.

For American social media, the statistical results of Table 5 shows that four presentation strategies played effective roles in developing the relationship between sojourners and Americans, but that there were differences in their degree of effectiveness. According to a ranking of their effect, the top three presentation strategies included two defensive ones, which were “reporting only good news” and “expressing controlled feelings,” and “reporting only good news” served as the most effective strategy to fulfill sojourners’ need for intercultural relatedness. This result was different from the situation on Chinese social media. That was, on Chinese social media, sojourners mainly adopted a proactive strategy to fulfill their need for relatedness with domestic relatives, friends, and Chinese Americans, while on American social media, sojourners preferred to use a defensive strategy to promote the fulfillment of their needs for relatedness. In the offline interview, the interviewees said that the strategy of “reporting only good news” could build a positive impression, activate dialog more quickly, and protect personal privacy. Such strategy conformed to the communication code of conduct on American social media, thus laying a good foundation for the establishment and maintenance of the interpersonal relations between Chinese sojourners and Americans. Additionally, the cultural context of American social media is obviously different from that of Chinese social media. In order to avoid possible cultural misunderstanding or even conflict, the interviewees said that they would control the limit of emotional expression on American social media. The results of interview analysis supported the quantitative research.

Table 5 . The effect of different self-presentation strategies on the fulfillment of the need for relatedness in American social media.

Our study recruited 223 Chinese sojourners in the United States as research participants, investigated, and analyzed the relationship between their self-presentation behavior and the fulfillment of their psychological needs (autonomy and relatedness) on Chinese and American social media.

The study shows that, compared with American social media, the self-presentation behavior on Chinese social media can more significantly promote the fulfillment of sojourners’ need for autonomy. This paper holds that the main reason for this difference may be cultural context, that is, Chinese social media are more conducive to the realization of the sojourners’ autonomy. After all, there are cultural values and relational networks that the sojourners are familiar and identified with. The higher the degree of identification and integration with the cultural context, the higher the degree of autonomy of individual actions ( Chirkov et al., 2003 ). In contrast, the cultural context of social media in the United States is relatively unfamiliar and features more heterogeneity. According to SDT, heterogeneity is a reverse force that hinders the realization of autonomy ( Deci and Ryan, 1985 , 2000 ); therefore, compared with the heterogeneous American social media, self-presentation behavior on Chinese social media is more active in promoting the satisfaction of the need for autonomy. Additionally, the results show that Chinese social media play a more active role in maintaining the relationship between sojourners and Chinese Americans than American social media. This result shows that the relatively homogeneous cultural context of Chinese social media provides sufficient emotional and spiritual exchange opportunities, as well as mutual social assistance space for sojourners and Chinese Americans, which is more recognized and adapted by both sides, thus helping to meet the fulfillment of their need for relatedness in the common cultural context ( Lim and Pham, 2016 ; Xiao et al., 2018 ).

This study found that on Chinese social media, the comprehensive use of proactive and defensive presentation strategies helps to meet sojourners’ need for autonomy, which to a certain extent reflects the expediency of Chinese self-presentation behavior ( Zhai, 2017 , p. 56). That is, even when “expressing one’s true self,” sojourners still pay attention to what to say and what not to say, what kind of emotion needs to be expressed and what need not be, which generally reflects that sojourners are striking a balance between sense and sensibility on Chinese social media. At the same time, the sojourners not only distribute and adjust their presentation content but also pay attention to “voicing one’s opinion” through different forms of media, and Chinese social media is technically providing the sojourners with different kinds of effective ways to present ideal self-images and realize autonomous expression.

There are significant differences between Chinese and American social media in the use of self-presentation strategies that help to fulfill sojourners’ need for relatedness. On Chinese social media, a proactive strategy is more effective in meeting sojourners’ need for relatedness, while on American social media, sojourners tend to use a defensive strategy to promote the fulfillment of their need for relatedness. This paper argues that the differences in the connotation of the relationship between Chinese and American cultures affect sojourners’ tendencies when choosing presentation strategies. In the Chinese context, relationship ( guanxi ) is “a kind of social force exerted by family chain and social structure prior to individual existence” ( Zhai, 2011 , p. 187). Individuals must actively maintain important relationships for settling down and gain identification from the social environment at the same time. For Chinese sojourners, their intercultural identity and experiences more intangibly promoting them to adopt proactive presentation strategies on Chinese social media to meet their need for relatedness, because on the one hand, they can help them to consolidate different domestic relationships, and on the other hand, the maintenance of domestic relationships can provide them emotional attachment and a sense of belonging, which help them to alleviate various negative emotions caused by cultural maladjustment.

Compared with the guanxi in China, interpersonal relationships in the American context are clear “role relationships” and have a distinct public-private boundary ( Chu, 1979 ). In the classic social interaction mode with an American-style interpersonal relationship at the core, the means of maintaining and developing the relationship presents very obvious characteristics of instrumental rationality ( Altman and Taylor, 1973 ). Most of the Chinese sojourners who participated in this study came to the United States between 1 and 2 years prior. With the purpose of achieving their specific goals of sojourning in the United States, they needed to develop intercultural interpersonal relationships with local Americans as much as possible; on the other hand, the context of American social media is full of strangeness, heterogeneity, and uncertainty, which made the sojourners more cautious and more aware of all kinds of intercultural communication barriers. Therefore, based on the identification and understanding of the characteristics of relationships in an American context, Chinese sojourners are more likely to adopt a defensive strategy as the main and proactive strategy as the auxiliary to achieve the purpose of fulfilling their need for intercultural relatedness on American social media.

Unlike most previous studies that mainly analyzed the relationship between self-presentation strategies and psychological need fulfillment in a single cultural context, this paper provides empirical evidence for the first time on how self-presentation strategies affect fulfillment of psychological needs in the contexts of dual culture (host and home culture), which provides new inspiration for the study of online self-presentation behavior of sojourners, an important intercultural communication group.

Future Directions

Future research might include empirical research on the relationship between online self-presentation strategies and the satisfaction of Chinese sojourners’ need for competence ( Deci and Ryan, 2000 ) in the United States. In addition, future research might examine how the psychological effects of Chinese sojourners’ online self-presentation behavior affect their offline intercultural adaptation and communication, as well as the acquisition of social capital; such research should be strictly followed by an intercultural analysis of the causes of the general impact. On the basis of empirical research, future research might discuss ways to positively promote the intercultural adaptation and communication of international sojourners, and help sojourners to maintain their psychological well-being in host countries over the long run.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for this study on human participants, which was in accordance with local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

TY contributed to research design, theoretical discussion, and manuscript writing. QY contributed to data processing and empirical analysis. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the Social Sciences General Project of China’s Sichuan Province (SC19B067), the research fund from Sichuan University (2018hhs-24, SCU-SOE-ZY-202008, SKSYL201822, and SCU-BS-PY-202003), and the Youth Fund Project for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (18YJC790204).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Sichuan University and all the funding resources that helped us in the completion of this research.

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Keywords: self-presentation strategies, fulfillment of need for autonomy, fulfillment of need for relatedness, social media, Chinese sojourners

Citation: Yang T and Ying Q (2021) Online Self-Presentation Strategies and Fulfillment of Psychological Needs of Chinese Sojourners in the United States. Front. Psychol . 11:586204. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586204

Received: 09 October 2020; Accepted: 29 December 2020; Published: 29 January 2021.

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*Correspondence: Qianwei Ying, [email protected]

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