IDENTITY CREATION IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS: A THEORETICAL EXPLORATION

Identity and online social networks are phenomena of our time and the search for and research on it is as powerful as the technological change in the history of the globalised world. On the one hand online social networks offer individuals the opportunity to create multiple identities based on valid information, and on the other hand acknowledge the fact these identities might be false and based on misinformation. In spite of the increased use of online social networks, limited research, especially from a communicative perspective, has been conducted on social processes and phenomena which are used to create online identities. One reason might be the social implications from the formation and use of online identities and advancement in processes of their transference into the real world. Based on recommendations by Acun (2011) and Attrill & Jalil (2011) that future research should focus on a theoretical exploration of identities in online social networks, this study sets out to investigate and address these gaps and to present a theoretical overview of the social processes and phenomena in the formation of identity in online social networks through an interpretivistic paradigm to gain an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. Drawing from social constructionism, social categorization, identity, social identity and knowledge management theoretical paradigms, as well as a consideration of the notional constructs of identity and online social networks, the main theoretical approaches to and key criteria thereof are proposed. This article therefore aims to serve the purpose to review the theoretical perspectives used to explain the formation of identities in online social networks and to identify the characteristics and factors that impede on it

IDENTITY IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS: ARTIFICIAL AND/OR REAL?

The search for and research on identity is as powerful as the technological change in the history of the globalised world. Despite this, the subject of identity, which gained importance the last few years, has not received the attention it deserves. Furthermore, limited research, especially from a communicative perspective, has been conducted on social processes and phenomena which are used to create online identities. One reason might be the social implications from the formation and use of online identities and advancement in processes of their transference into the real world, which can have far reaching implications. Based on recent recommend-dations that future research should focus on a theoretical exploration of identities in online social networks (Acun 2011; Attrill & Jalil 2011), this study sets out to investigate and address these gaps and to present a theoretical overview of the social processes and phenomena in the formation of identity in online social networks. Drawing from social constructionism, social categorization, social identity and knowledge management theoretical paradigms, as well as a consideration of the notional constructs of identity and online social networks, the main theoretical approaches to and key criteria thereof are proposed. This paper therefore aims to serve the purpose to review the theoretical perspectives used to explain the formation of identities in online social networks and to identify the characteristics and factors that impede on it

Media monitoring using social networks

With the rapid rise in the number of weblogs, or blogs, on the World Wide Web (WWW), there is a growing need to be able to quickly search for discussion on specific topics. While keyword searches using tools such as Google [4] or Technorati [18] can yield useful results, we run into the problem of having to enter contextualizing keywords to filter out unwanted and irrelevant search results. This has the unfortunate consequence of making the search process more complicated and possibly filtering out search hits that we would typically want. This paper outlines an approach to narrow search results to only relevant hits, while allowing for general keyword queries. Since the blogosphere constitutes a social network, the solution, BlogCrawler, attempts to use the properties of social networks to narrow the focus of search queries to only those blogs that the user is interested in. This paper presents an algorithm and empirical evaluation that exploits the social network implicit in blogs found on the WW