Maria Alvarez

9/23/2019

Social Media & Identity Draft 1

Being a teenager is a critical part of people's lives because they start to shape their

identities. In the past teenagers build their identity based on the things that surround them like

their community, their school, their family and even their church, this because all they want to do

is fit in. Nowadays teens are being influenced by social media they use, the people they follow,

the brands they like, and other different cultures that have access their lives thanks to technology.

This has gave teenagers the freedom to build themselves and their thinking in different things.

However this does not mean that what they express online and who their are online is acceptable

by the people that surround them in real life, therefore teenagers tend to have two identities, their

identity online and their identity in real life.

As a teen our main goal is to fit in with a certain group of people, for example if you like

sports you try to fit in with the athletes, if you like music with the band members, if you like art

with the artist, etc. The same thing happens in social media but a little different, in the article

“Millennial teens design and redesign themselves in online social networks” by Leigh Doster,

Doster highlights the way teenagers fit in by using social media, she states “teens use OSNs in

the ‘construction of cool’, carefully crafting self-images with words, imagery and media in order

to manage the impression others have of them. Their objective is to look ‘cool’ and generate peer

validation” (pg. 269). This demonstrates that with social media teens are taking a different
approach to “fitting in”, online a teen might post similar pictures as their friends and in real life

the same teen probably dresses similarly to his/her friend group.

Teens tend to become someone different online because they are embarrassed of who

they really are or also because it helps them feel accepted by other people online. For example

Leigh Doster said in his article “Millennial teens design and redesign themselves in online social

networks”; “Individuals may also choose to suppress some aspects of their actual self from

certain audiences in order to maintain their desired self-image.” (pg.269) This is pretty self

explanatory, saying that teens hide some aspects of their life to fit in with other people online.

This is not always the case there are times when teens will die some things they like or some of

their preferences to people in their life but they will show that part of themselves to people

online.

In Conclusion technology has made teenagers reshape their identities online and in real

life with the simple goal of finding peer validation. This goes back to teens being something or

somebody that they can not be in real life because it is unapproved by their parents, society, and

everyone around them. Having two different identities is like having two different people living

inside one body, this has become true to some people that show their online identity to be one

and their real life identities to be a completely different one. The overall goal of a teen is to fit in

weather is online or in real life, but social media and technology has shaped this teens identities

by putting out standard that teens have to follow to be accepted by everyone.

 Work Cited

Doster, Leigh. “Millennial Teens Design and Redesign Themselves in Online Social

Networks.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour, vol. 12, no. 4, 2013, pp. 267–279.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cb.1407​ Acces date 9/23/2019