User:Raiekas

Self-Branding on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

This study explores the tensions of authenticity in digital culture by focusing on social media profiles on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and their correlation to the person’s true self-identity. In many regards contemporary culture is constantly perceived as framing the self in relation to beliefs of authenticity and as digital culture is increasingly able to feedback lifestyles, tastes and meanings onto users through the emergence of social media platforms and the notion of ‘self-branding’, questions of authenticity begin to surface furthermore. Therefore many discussions of consumption and production in the media industry tend to focus on what behaviours and attitudes towards objects (Facebook ‘likes’, twitter ‘following’) are considered genuine or authentic reflections of self and culture.

This project predominantly focuses on the affects of diverse social media platforms’ interface designs on people’s representations of self and explores the dynamics of the audiences involved in self-branding and attempts to categorize and correlate the genre of various self-identities evident on social media platforms to the type of audiences using those identities to represent their ‘desired self’.