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alternative sources of information on Islam and Muslim and maintaining the image of being open to discussions of their religion are also conducive to their objective. The three images above altogether give people the impression that it is fine to come to these Taiwanese Muslims and find answers. And to have access to the information is the start of changing their impression in their minds.
5.3 A Self-disciplined Person
The third strategy is to develop an impression of being self-disciplined. By self-disciplined, the interviewees indicated that they usually try to present a more clean-living lifestyle, such as not posting photos of themselves drinking and smoking, not using curse words on Facebook, or not being argumentative. Some of them mentioned the religious doctrines which the Islam promote, but all of them are presenting the self-disciplined image because they are fully aware that Muslims are the minority in Taiwanese society and it is very likely for people to view their personal behavior as representative of all Taiwanese Muslims or even all Muslims in the world. Thus they have to maintain the self-disciplined image carefully or even cautiously. As Basim said:
“I would like people to have the impression that Ibo is a Muslim who doesn’t behave weirdly or inappropriately. Ibo does not drink and he does not mess up his relationship…. I want them to have this kind of impression
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to make it easier for them to accept the idea that ’Ibo is not equal to terrorist.’ I’ve been trying to do that although I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded.
But I still want to be a good model [of Muslim] even if it means that I have to pretend.”
Goffman (1959) also noted that the audience usually views individual performers and his/her ongoing performance of self-presentation as the representation of the team, namely the social group the performers belong to, in this study it would be Muslim communities. In Goffman’s approach, the performers ought to follow the rules that are set by the team because any failed detail during performance may ruin all of the social group’s efforts and lead to the lost battle of impression management.
Thus, it is necessary for the team to have disciplines and make sure every performer follows the disciplines when performing in front of audiences. For the interviewees, their performance of a self-disciplined image not only helps to build a better image in front of non-Muslim audiences but also maintains their loyalty to the team of Muslims.
Some of them indicated that they have had to adjust their posts after Muslim relatives pointed out the improper behavior they demonstrated in those posts. As Fateenah said:
“Usually I don’t post photos of myself hanging out with friends at places such as karaoke because there may be alcohol in the scenes. On Facebook I have many Muslim friends who often go to mosques. I don’t think it is good
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to post them [the photos] on my wall even though I did not drink at all.”
Besides dietary taboos, the regulation of interpersonal relationships between genders is a performance of the highest importance on Facebook, according to 5 interviewees.
These interviewees have all had the experience of being warned not to get too close to the opposite sex or not to wear clothes that fail to cover the body as the religious scriptures regulate. The experiences effectively influence the interviewees’ posts, which are then quickly adjusted to give appropriate performance. However, the interviewees adopted different strategies to prevent inappropriate performances from being watched by the team instead of adjusting their actual behavior in life. Their strategies are the core issue to be explicated in the next chapter.
5.4 Summary
In this chapter, I identified three kinds of interviewees’ strategies in their self-presentation on Facebook. Each of these strategies is presented to separate audiences and for different purposes as shown in the following table:
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Strategies 1. Sources of
Correct
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Ch6 Usage of Facebook Functions for Impression Management by Young Taiwanese Muslims
In Chapter 4 and 5, I indicated the three main elements of Taiwanese Muslim identity performance: 1. their identity as Taiwanese Muslims, 2. how they perceive Taiwan mainstream society as audience and audience’s expectation, and 3. the impressions they want to perform to reverse the potentially negative perceptions against Islamic religion and Muslim as a whole.
In this chapter, I would like to address the interviewees’ impression management by focusing on the differences across various interactive communication functions and privacy setting functions of Facebook. According to Cover‘s study (2012), the interactive communication functions include updating, commenting, responding and tagging. Not only the textual, audio and visual contents that are deliberately presented by users but the interactions between users in the public or semi-public environment can be considered part of the performance of identity because relationships are considered one of the prominent elements in the performance of identity. On the other hand, the privacy setting functions provided by Facebook (2017) allows users to select who can view their updates and every other type of content post by post. Users can also decide whether to let contents show on their timeline when someone tags them and to block someone from bothering them. While the interactive communication functions serve as tools for performing the self, the privacy setting
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functions serve as tools for managing the confines between various social stages.
Using these two types of functions, the interviewees developed their strategies of impression management and then performed these ideal impressions to establish better images of Muslim.