ABSTRACT
Every day, more than 2.5 billion people interact through Facebook acting as producers, curators, and consumers of content, and in doing this, they share information, opinions, expressions, and emotions. Through these interactions, users also build media representations of themselves. This chapter reviews which elements of Facebook allow its users to virtually manifest their identities and the mechanisms that influence the way people use those elements. Identity is a social construct determined by a series of meanings attributed to an individual. Sociologist and social psychologist Erving Goffman stated that this construction contains a series of consciously manifested signs and another group of signs that are unconsciously presented. The content people post on social media is influenced by elements of design present on each platform interface that inform them of how they can use the elements of the platform and persuade them, without being deterministic, to use them in specific ways. This is what is known as affordances.
