Who am I in the

CYBERWO
Digital Self
RLD
•“What’s on your mind?”
•“Share your story”
•“Think before,
you Click”
REAL IDENTITY
vs
ONLINE IDENTITY
 INTRODUCTION
These days, more people are becoming active in using
the internet for research, pleasure, business,
communication, and other purposes. Indeed the Internet
is of great help for everyone. On the other hand, people
assume different identities while in cyberspace. People
act differently when they are online and offline. We have
our real identity and online identity.
 ABSTRACTION
The number of who are becoming more active online
continues to increase worldwide. More than half of the
population worldwide now uses the internet. It has only
been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the World
Wide Web available to public, but in that time, the
internet has already become an integral part of everyday
life for most of the world’s population. The Philippines
is one of the most active internet users.
 Selective
Self-Presentation
and
Impression
Management
 Goffman (1959) & Leary
(1995)
Self-presentation
is the “process of controlling how one is perceived
by other people” and is the key to relationship inception
and development. To construct positive images,
individuals selectively provide information about them
and carefully cater this information in response to
other’s feedback.
TWO TYPES OF IDENTITIES
IN CYBERWORLD
PERSONAL
IDENTITY SOCIAL IDENTITY
The interpersonal level The level of self
of self which whereby the individuals
differentiates the is identified by his or
individuals as unique her group
from others. memberships.
 Kinds of Selective
Self-Presentation
1. Facebook/Social Media
2. Diaries
3. Websites
4. Albums
5. Selfies/Groupies
 Schwarz (2010)

We have entered an extraordinary era of

self-portraiture.
Labreque, Markos and Milne (2011); Sheperd
(2005); Sulfer (2002); Zimmer and Hoffman
(2011)

Phenomenon of Oversharing
 Fear of Missing Out
Because of the conversion of private diaries into
public revelations of inner secrets, the lack of
privacy in many aspects of social media make the
users more vulnerable, leading to compulsively
checking newsfeeds and continually adding tweets
and postings in order to appear active and
interesting.
 Disinhibition Effect
The lack of face-to-face gaze-meeting, together
with feelings of anonymity and invisibility, gives
people the freedom for self-disclosure but can
also “Flame” others and may cause conflict
sometimes.
 Disinhibition Effect
The resulting of disinhibition causes people to
believe that they are able to believe that they are
able to express their “true self” better online than
they could in face-to-face context cited in Taylor
(2002).
 Morris et. al. (2010)

SELF-REVELATION
is therapeutic than
SELF-REFLECTION
Relationships may become
STRONGER or BROKEN
through post online
 Why confess to unseen and anonymous
others online?

“Confessing our secret truths feels

feeling, even as it binds us in a
guilt-motivated self-governance born of a
long history of Christian and
pre-Christian philosophers and power
structure.”
 Why confess to unseen and anonymous
others online?

Confession, along with contemplation.

Self-examination, learning, reading and
writing self-critical letters to friends, are a
part of the “technologies of the self” through
which we seek to purge and cleanse
ourselves.
Foucault’s (1978, 1998)
 Conclusion
We should have a filtering system to whatever information we
share online, as well as to what information we believe in,
which are being shared or posted by others online. We should
look at online information carefully whether they are valid and
true before believing or promoting them. In the same way we
should also think well before we post or share anything online
in order to prevent conflict, arguments, and cyberbullying, and
to preserve our relationships with others.
 Gender
And
Sexuality Online
 Marwick (2013)

The term SEX, GENDER, and SEXUALITY are

often thought of as synonymous, they are actually
quite distinct. The differences between the
common understandings of these terms and how
researchers think about them yield key insight
about the social functioning of gender.
 SEX

The biological state that

corresponds to what we might call
“man” or a “woman”
 GENDER
The social understanding of how sex
should be experienced and how sex
manifest in behaviour, personality,
preferences, capabilities, and so
gender.
 SEXUALITY
An individual expression and
understanding of desire. While like gender,
this is often viewed as binary (homosexual
or heterosexual), in reality, Sexuality is
often experienced as fluid.
Performing
Gender
Online
 Theorist Judith Butler (1990)

Conceptualized gender as a performance. She

explained that popular understandings of gender and
sexuality came to be through discourse and social
processes. She argued that gender was performative
that comes naturally to men and women. Performances
that adhere to normative understandings of gender and
sexuality are allowed, while thoses that do not
admonished.
 Wynn and Katz (1997)

According to the disembodiment hypothesis,

internet users are free to actively choose
which gender or sexuality they are going to
portray with possibility of creating alternate
identities.
 Recently, social media has been celebrated for
facilitating greater cultural participation and
creativity. Social media sites like Twitter and Youtube
have led to the emergence of “FREE CULTURE”
where individuals are empowered to engage cultural
production using raw materials ranging from
homemade videos to mainstream television characters
to create new culture, memes and humor.
But merely equality of use does not indicate equality of
participation. While both men and women use
Wikipedia, 87% of Wikipedia contributors were
identified as male (LaValle, 2009). Male students are
more likely to create edit and distribute digital video
over Youtube or Facebook than female students. One
explanation for these differences is that user-generated
content is often clustered by gender.
 Researchers have consistently shown that similar
numbers of men and women maintain a blog about 14%
of internet users (Lenhart et. al., 2010). While the
number of male and female bloggers is roughly
equivalent, they tend to blog about different things.
Although the technologies are the same, the norms and
mores of the people using it differ.
 Setting Boundaries
To Your Online Self:
Smart Sharing
 ONE

Is this post/story necessary?

 TWO

Is there a real benefit to this

post? Is it funny? Ward-hearted?
Teachable? Or am I just making
noise online without purpose?
 THREE

Have we resolved this issue? An

issue that is still being worked out at
home, or one that is either
vulnerable or highly emotional,
should not be made in public.
 FOUR

Is it appropriate? Does it stay within

the boundaries of our family values?
 FIVE

Will this seem as funny as 5, 20, 15

years? Or is this post better suited
for sharing with small group of
family members? Or maybe not at
all?
 RULES TO FOLLOW
• Stick to safer sites
• Guard your passwords
• Limit what you share
• Remember anything you put online or post on a site is
there forever, even if you try to delete it
• Do not be mean or embarrass other people online
• Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior online
• Be choosy about your online friends
• Be patient