2.2 Theoretical Background: Dramaturgical Approach…
2.2.2 Identity Performance of Minority Groups and Social Network
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likely to use pseudo name as Facebook gradually acquired greater popularity, there are other popular SNSs that do not require users to show their real names, such as Twitter, instagram and many others; most users, however, usually still befriend people they already know in the offline world in the initial stages of using a SNS (Boyd, 2012).
Thus, individuals are no longer able to create various new identities in the world of SNSs. People are now finding that, even on SNSs, they face people they already know offline and are obliged to give performances to family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. As noted by Boyd (2008), the default structure of SNSs usually assumes that individuals are at the center of the public stage and that every piece of content they produce is for the purpose of conveying messages to members of the public within their networks. As a result, the social boundaries bound to physical world disappear on SNSs. The overlapping of audiences, termed as “context collapse,”
and the obscurity between front stage and back stage leading to increasing tensions for SNSs users (Binder, Howes & Sutcliffe, 2009) because users are unable to decide upon the most appropriate form of performance to present in front of so many different groups of audiences.
2.2.2 Identity Performance of Minority Groups and Social Network Sites
Many early studies viewed the Internet as a virtual world in which individuals’ spatial,
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social and physical features can be mostly filtered out (Reynolds & Greenfield, 2004;
Chang and Tsuen, 2012). This utopian advantage seemed to make the Internet the
“voice of the voiceless” through which minority groups are allowed to articulate their differences with safety (Bunt, 2000; Youssef, 2013). Yet, previous studies have also identified that SNSs are often designed to connect the personal networks of users. It is common for users on SNSs to be divided into groups according to offline networks that already exist, for example, alumni from the same university, residents who live in the same neighborhood, or colleagues who work in the same industries (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Grasmuck et al. (2009) also pointed out social networks on Facebook are mostly linked to the real-life community of users. While the nonymous setting of SNSs is reflective of offline social relationships, the online performance of identity anchors social structures and even the broader social hierarchy in which individuals live. Therefore, Goffman’s ideas of impression management, which suggest that people always manage to act out ideal images in front of others in face-to-face communication, seem to revive and regain significance in the self-presentation of minorities within the identifiable environments of SNSs.
Impression management on SNSs not only involves the self- presentation of individuals but also relate to the collective endeavors of groups that users belong to (Litt et al, 2014). As Goffman suggested, our ideal self is often influenced by the social group to which we belong. Members of a community who have identified themselves as part of a social group often share common cultural marks and values
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(Stets & Burke, 2000; Shafie et al, 2012). While individuals perform themselves in front of group members, they are also exchanging and reproducing the similar marks that make them feel tied to each other (Pearson, 2009). In their studies on the ethnic and racial identity presentation of college students on Facebook, Grasmuck et al (2009) found that students of racial minorities who are African American, Latino American, and Indian American love to present the cultural features of their own ethno-racial community through profiles, photos and personal interests such as movie or literature preferences. They also tend to upload photos of social occasions intensively. Scholars see the phenomenon as a form of empowerment, one that emphasizes the connection of individual strengths therefore competing with broader society. The usage habit of SNSs may also be replicated across the individual networks of group members. Correa and Jeong (2011) have furthermore found that users of minority groups in the US tend to express their thoughts and feelings on SNSs more than for the purpose of maintaining contact with their friends. However, different groups of people tend to express their thoughts in different ways. Correa and Jeong indicated that while Asian students like to consider SNS a personal diary with which to record their life and wish for little feedback, African Americans are more active in presenting their cultures to the world.
The system of SNSs provides users with online spheres on which we can not only create images in the way we want others to perceive ourselves (Cunningham, 2012) but also to negotiate our social positions with the majority and other social groups.
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Schuschke (2015) stated that African American students are “applying SNSs to counter-hegemonic narratives and discriminatory social structures” (p.77) that had previously stereotyped them as the inferior race. Compared to white people, African Americans have been found to pay much more attention to civic and political activities online (Harp et al, 2010). The Egyptian Coptic Christians, especially after the 2011 Egyptian revolution that drove the country to become a more religious Islamic society, are also utilizing websites and Facebook to facilitate more interaction with their target audiences and to gain more significant roles in framing issues of citizen and integration (Yousef, 2013).
As the main subjects of this study, Muslims all over the world have found opportunities on SNSs to express their opinions on identity, religion, and culture as much as has other minorities. Al-Rawi (2016) concluded that SNSs like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are considered to be “alternative media channels” (p. 26) for Muslims as a platform for both self-expression and public dialogue. Shuriye, et al (2013) are of the view that the communicative movement that to disseminate information brought about by Muslims is underway to changing the way Arabs/Muslims and the West perceive each other. Leurs, et al (2012) found that Moroccan-Dutch adolescents are devoted to debates about the meaning of multiculturalism in the Netherlands by providing their narratives to reframe the homogeneous and negative images of Moroccan Muslims in mainstream media through online message boards and SNSs. Even within Muslim groups, individuals
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are likely to present a diversity of images to alter the homogenous impression of themselves in the perception and imagination of others. Piela (2010) showed how three British Muslim women consciously challenged the biased representation of Muslim women by continuously constructing direct, powerful but interesting images of religious identity. They received positive feedback from the audiences on their self-presentation. She also disclosed (2017) how a Muslim woman in Scotland who wears niqab, a face-covering cloth that Muslim women wear in public areas, used a photo-sharing SNS to present herself and to negotiate the role of niqab in Muslim women’s lives even as these women were essentially excluded from intense public debate and not allowed to voice their opinions. Beta (2014) also found that young Indonesian women are applying different forms of new media, including blogs and SNSs, to shape a new type of urban Muslim identity as “Hijaber”, representing a
“‘fun’ and a ’colorful’ take on lslam.”(p.377)
Nevertheless, when minority groups present themselves to various groups of audiences, they face many more possibilities as well as risks that negative stereotypes harbored by the majority of society may enhance on SNSs under the challenge of context collapse (Duguay, 2016). Vitak (2012) address that SNSs encourage more one-to-many communication than interaction between individuals. The audiences from many social contexts have consistently become overlapping. Users feel threatened by context collapse because they are uncertain who is going to see their performance. The more social groups an individual belongs to, the greater the chance
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s/he feels more anxious because s/he has more different kinds of desired self to present (Litt et al 2014).
When confronted with the challenge, individuals within different social contexts tend to apply different strategies to avoid collapsing. For example, both whites and Asians in the U.S. express awareness of the uncontrollable nature of the online environment.
When hostile interactions taking place online, however, whites are driven away from certain public spaces while Asians tend to stay but lower the level of publicity of their posts (Correa and Joeng, 2010). Focusing on the issue of context collapse among the SNS performance strategies of stigmatized LGBTQ users, Duguay (2016) pointed out that LGBTQ users in the UK developed the tactic to “tailor their identity expressions”
(p899) on Facebook to avoid being outed or questioned by homophobic people who can see their posts. When posting their thoughts on sexual identity, they tend to post ambiguous and encoded messages assuming that the message would remain unrecognizable to the untargeted audience.
In addition, the categorization between minority and majority may not be sufficient to illustrate the complicated context among different social groups and their identity performance. Other social identities such as younger generations can be key factors that greatly influencing their religious or ethnic identity because young people tend to seek better positions within their societies (Yousef, 2013). Siibak (2009) indicated that it is crucial that people are aware of the fact that standards of the desirable self
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come from others on a continuous basis. Especially in the case of gender, the norms and values of how girls should appear are acutely perceived and rapidly adopted by girls when it comes to the selection of photos uploaded. In other words, favorable images can only be produced or presented when individuals are conscious of what others are expecting from them.
Following this line of inquiry, this present research seeks to examine Taiwanese Muslims’ presentation of identity on SNSs. Considering the global context of thriving Islamphobia and the relatively low visibility of Taiwanese Muslims in Taiwan society, what would be their impression management strategy if self-presentation were anchored upon their social situations in real life?