ABSTRACT
Th e student portraits detailed in chapter 3 reveal the nature of campus life online, a new reality that these students say is central to their college experience. In their own voices, these students share their perceptions of behavioral norms as well as how they think identity is constructed and interpreted in the online social world. How these and other students talk about identity in this context, however, seems to be in opposition to the paradigmatic view that student aff airs administrators, those professionals primarily responsible for the oversight of campus life, hold of college student identity. On Facebook, college student identity is distinctly postmodern. Students shift between multiple selves and experiment with diff erent identities, revealing alternate faces to their audiences by taking advantage of the agency they are aff orded by Facebook’s privacy settings. As Kris, Jordan, Teresa, and Matthew, the students whose stories we told, showed us, they have to constantly navigate between these selves when they post aspects of their identities online. It is not an easy task. Even those like Kris, with a high level of consciousness, rarely do it perfectly.
