ABSTRACT
Through exploring the processes of identity performance that shape social media interactions, this chapter makes a case for conceptualizing social media as a product of people’s social lives, rather than seeing digital technology as an external factor determining social behavior. The chapter-opening quote comes from Siobhan, a participant in a survey we carried out into the social factors that shape decisions about what and how people post to the social media platform Facebook. This particular comment is typical of a large proportion of responses from the survey. Siobhan consciously negotiates her personal, social and professional lives online based on her perceptions both of the affordances of the social media context and the ways in which identity work is socially achieved in this context. Processes of identity performance on social media, such as the one illustrated here, take place in an environment which is usually described in the literature in terms of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd, 2011), whereby various offline audiences (e.g., family members, work colleagues, friends) are brought together in a single online space. This context has been shown to trigger a complex range of audience design strategies on the part of some users (Tagg & Seargeant, 2014), who negotiate the possible communicative hazards that the environment can give rise to by targeting their posts at certain sections of their audience while excluding others and by making conscious decisions about style and content based on their intuition of the contexts in which their posts may be read and interpreted. In this chapter, we develop the notion
of context collapse to better account for users’ agency in constructing context through their decisions using our theoretical concept of ‘context design’ (Tagg, Seargeant & Aisha Brown, forthcoming).
