The Facebook Facade

By Aydan Johnstone

Image Author: INFINITY

Facebook is the perfect place to construct an identity that is tailored to the theme of your networked narrative. Some people use this to their advantage, expressing their opinions and emotions through Facebook which may have been difficult for them to achieve in real life. Although in a sense they may be presenting themselves differently than in real life, they would still be considered 'authentic'. This is because they are merely channeling their emotions and opinions through a different avenue that enables them to do so. However, some people use Facebook to construct a 'fake' online identity, which can be can be constructed through a Facebook profile that fakes happiness, success or your actual identity for example. This is known as a 'Facebook Facade' and Mark Zuckerberg seems to believe that people are their authentic selves on Facebook, and those who are not are frauds (McNiell, 2012). 

McNeill did expand on this and claimed that Zuckerberg’s concept of authenticity was based on Facebook's tendency to elicit certain categories of self-performance. The result of this is that our identity is able to be constructed through unauthentic motives, and the networked narrative does not reflect self-hood. This concept of constructing an unauthentic identity through social conventions of self-performance is quite similar to the theory of 'Dramaturgy' developed by Erving Goffman. Dramaturgy was based on the premise that society played the largest role in directing who we are and through that, we are always acting to cater to these social conventions. Mark Zuckerberg had a similar view, insisting: "the close embrace of the corporate, technological, and autobiographical enables the software to play a significant role in directing who users imagine themselves to be". 

This is a clear demonstration of what Victoria had mentioned in the lecture, proving that changes in digital technology have changed certain qualities of networked narratives (Kuttainen, 2015). In this case 'authenticity' is the quality that has been changed through our construction of identities and networked narratives.

References:

Kuttainen, V. (2015). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place, Week 6: Networked Narratives: Intertextuality. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/

McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No" I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Post human Auto/Biography. Biography, 35(1), 65-82.

Unknown, A. (2015). Mark Zuckerberg. Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Unknown, B. (2015). Dramaturgy (Sociology). Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)

Unknown, C. (2015). Erving Goffman. Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman

Image Reference:

INFINITY. (2015). Is Facebook Feeding Your Ego. Retrieved from: https://universeinyou.wordpress.com/author/universeinyou/