As the Internet has become increasingly integrated into people’s everyday lives, it has
become increasingly important to consider the opportunities it provides for social
interaction, self-presentation and self expression. Online spaces have often been
considered to be quintessentially postmodern in potentials, allowing for play and
experimentation detached from local geographic contexts and disconnected from visual
markers of difference such as gender and ethnicity. Debates about affordances and
potentials of online interaction have been reframed by several emergent trends in
Internet usage encapsulated in the term ‘Web 2.0 networked social media’- including
social networking and media sharing sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. These
sites represent a renewed focus on the production of an ‘authentic’, often visually
represented self online, strongly grounded in both offline and online networks of
experiences, locations, relationships and contacts. These occupy a differing, interesting
set of positions with respect to theories of contemporary identity and sociality,
emphasising authenticity and permanence and embedding the individual in local
contexts rather than emphasising anonymity and fluidity.
This PhD investigates the impact of these trends, broadly examining gender, self-presentation,
identity and interaction in the context of contemporary online spaces.
Examining self-presentational and interactional practices and the display of taste online,
this thesis will argue that the concept of ‘authenticity’ is a crucial structuring factor
across all aspects of contemporary online interaction. The thesis will explore and
examine the implications of this discourse of authenticity which delineates the
boundaries of acceptable online self-presentation and interaction, and yet lies in tension
with the complexities of impression management across the complex merged audiences
brought together on social networking sites. The uncertainties and ambiguities of the
merged audience here provoke a reflexivity which leads to a reaffirmation of an
essentially unreflexive, pre-social self as ‘authentic’. Taking into account the need to
account for agency and reflexivity the thesis will work towards an understanding of
online self-presentation, gender and identity which incorporates the multiple narrative,
performative and aesthetic aspects of identity