Identity and representation in Social Media and Games.

Identity  can have quite a broad definition. Put shortly, your identity is what makes you you. Everyone has their own individual identity. Features which make up your identity, such as your name, appearance and characteristics are easily changed in an online environment.

There are many things which can effect a persons representation of their identity. Your gender, geographical location, class, political views and other features can attribute to the representation you give of yourself. For example, if you wore dark clothes, had piercings, listened to metal music and were friends with people with the same interests, you may be in the subculture 'goths' and that would be how people saw you. This would then become part of your identity.

With the popularity of social networking, it'd be hard to find someone without a Facebook or Twitter account, or at least some form of social networking activity in the past, such as MySpace or Bebo which are now less used thanks to the popularity and mainstream use of Facebook and Twitter.  On the internet, no-one knows who you are. If you put in false details in an account, no-one would know who you really are, because how can they possibly prove it?

''On our personal homepage, however, we can manipulate all the elements until we are satisfied.'' - Goffman & Identity - Charles Cheung, Presentations of Self on Personal Homepages, in web.studies, p. 47

With sites like Facebook and Twitter, you have to fill out a profile giving details about you. They ask for your name, age, gender, e-mail address and other details. You also have the choice to put in pictures and other information about yourself, such as hobbies and interests. 

In a face to face meeting, it is hard to conceal your initial identity, your gender, age, location etc. People often judge someone within the first 5 seconds of meeting them. First impressions and conversations often mould the way people see each other. Online, you have the chance to act differently how you would in a real face to face conversation, because you have the protection of physical concealment. You could quite literally become anyone. There are obviously safety risks which come with this. Online grooming has arisen as a big problem online. This is where young people, in fact anyone is talking/communicating online with someone they think they know, however this person turns out to be entirely different. These people often try to get their victims to meet up with them or even send sexually explicit pictures of themselves over the web. The obvious problems that arise here include paedophilia, abduction and even rape.

Online, you have the opportunity to alter who you are. On a profile, you could pretend you are a world class sailor and have the photo's to prove it. You can change the music you like, you can put up certain pictures which show you in an entirely different light to how you usually look and what you normally do. You can post pictures to show how many friends you have, or perhaps that you have a love interest. You can exaggeration your own life or completely make one up. 

Most online profiles are supposedly private however there are ways in which anyone can access them. Pictures on facebook will show up on any search engine if you search the right tags. For example, my name 'Jonika Kinchin' is quite unusual. I actively use Facebook and Twitter and use my real name on both websites. Having google imaged my name, I discovered:

All these images are from social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo some years ago. Some are even from a college website from about a year ago. This shows not only that it's very easy to find someone on the internet if you know what to search and where to look, but that I could never really make a new identity for myself as these images will still be on the internet and easy to find.