Would someone be able to reconginze your personality from your online profile? Is Kermit the frog, enough of an indicator? They may discover your favourite music, interests, and your sense of humour, yet find themselves unable to truly connect to the parts you choose to keep private. In this digital world identity is constructed through what we share and leave out, and often what we leave out can be far more important.
Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) has argued that people manage how others perceive them, comparing social interaction to a performance. His concept of impression management helps explain how we construct online identities. Choosing a username, profile picture or biography gives others clues about who we are, before any conversation begins. Applying Goffman’s ideas online, even an apparently casual profile can involve careful decisions about the impression it creates.
Let’s consider someone who is using a anime character as their profile picture in a gaming community but a formal photograph on a professional account. These choices communicate different things, shared interests in one setting and employability in another. Neither necessarily represents a false identity. Instead, each highlights qualities that seem relevant to a particular audience. We already behave differently around friends, lecturers and employers, so why expect one online profile to represent everything?
However, keeping these identities separate can become difficult. Marwick and boyd (2011) describe context collapse, where different audiences come together in the same online space. A joke intended for friends could also reach relatives or colleagues. Their research helps explain why people might avoid certain subjects or carefully imagine who will read their posts.
This creates a tension between expression and acceptance. Imagine someone who enjoys sharing artwork but receives more attention for humorous posts. They might gradually present themselves mainly as “the funny person”, leaving their creativity less visible. In this example, identity becomes a negotiation between what someone wants to express and what their audience rewards.
But these digital identities are also offering opportunities. Someone who’s going to feel uncofmortable discussing their interests in person (or ‘offline’,) is going to have a chance to find a welcoming community online. So using a nickname, or profile picture / avatar can just lead to participation becoming easier. Instead of treating anonymity as automatically dishonest, we can understand it as a way of controlling disclosure while exploring a different aspect of ourselves.
For me, really, the key issue is how much freedom people have to shape their identities. Digital spaces can encourage experimentation and belonging, but audience expectations can become restrictive. Before asking whether someone’s online identity is, well, “real,” we may need to shift our focus to asking, do they feel able to change it?
References:
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Marwick, A.E. and boyd, d. (2011) ‘I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience’, New Media & Society, 13(1), pp. 114–133.
