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6.3 Pages and groups: new stage, new performance
Given the difficulty for users to maintain audience segregation and confines of stages on their own timelines, creating a new stage outside their timelines is another choice to express their identity as a Muslim. Among the interviewees, there are a few who are highly involved in the promotion of knowledge of Islam and Muslim or in the Taiwanese Muslim communities’ activity. Instead of self-presentation, they adopted different social tools on Facebook, such as “page” and “group” to create new stages for the purpose of contributing to the public movements of Taiwanese Muslims and to separate their personal life from the public audience in the meantime.
Five years ago Jamil created an informative page to share knowledge about all kinds of topics on Islam and Muslims. The content he shares through the page are mainly news reports, comments, analysis and academic essays. In his words, he created the page for audiences who are not his Facebook friends. As he said:
“I create the page for people who are not my friend, so they can have the chance to access these topics……Mostly for Taiwanese or Chinese in other regions.”
For Jamil, the page gives him an exclusive platform on which to provide correct
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information and to maintain privacy at the same time. With the page, he can share information with a much larger audience who may not know any Muslim friends but are nevertheless willing to gain more knowledge about them; meanwhile, he doesn’t have to add curious stranger as his Facebook friends and share his personal life with them.
However, creating the new stage does not mean that his personal timeline is not a stage anymore. Jamil said that he still likes to share contents on his timeline as long as he finds them worthy of read or rarely seen on mass media. Yet he considers the content shared on the page more serious than the content on his timeline. As he said:
“I share everything I find interesting on my timeline, they can be quite casual or even funny. But the page is for the public so I cannot post any content that I like. People may misunderstand what I want to express if I don’t comment on it seriously. I used to write a lot comments [on the posts].
Generally, it takes me at least 15 minutes on each post. When I don’t have much time to write, I just share them on the page.”
The other kind of new stage is pages or groups that represent the interviewees’ offline identity or social activities of the Muslim community, such as NCCU Islamic Culture Club, Muslim Youth of Taiwan and Chinese Muslim Association Taipei. Some of them are pages of Muslim student clubs in universities, some of them are groups that
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allow Muslim to share and discuss information on the Islamic lifestyle and religious doctrines; some groups even allow non-Muslim members to join and to exchange opinions.
At least four interviewees have been founders or directors of these pages and groups.
They mainly share information about offline activities of Muslim in Taiwan, including student clubs’ gathering, exhibitions and speeches for the public. They also share knowledge about Islam through these pages and groups. The new stage is no longer a stage for individual performers to build self-images but a stage for all Muslims in Taiwan to present themselves and to advance community cohesion. As Firas said:
“When I was the president of Muslim Youth of Taiwan, I found that Facebook groups are very useful means to announce new information and to bring Muslim members together.”
It is rather notable that while they create a new stage for the public audience, the functions of pages and groups are not new to the Internet. Blogs, Bulletin Board System and other forms of online forums that provide a topic-centered communicative environment have existed far before the SNS-era. Facebook’s pages and groups that function as similar environments as pre-SNS websites allow users who have the motives of performance to employ the functions to create different stage based on their needs. Moreover, when it seems that the interviewees create pages and groups to
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divide their private stages from stages for uncertain audiences, they did not intend to completely divide their performances from the two stages. In fact, all of them frequently share posts from the pages on their own timeline. Many of their Facebook friends also know that they are running the pages. For the interviewees, they use their timeline to promote the activities they want people to attend or to notice. While they create a new stage to give specific performances for the uncertain audiences, they keep providing the serious, professional and informative contents so their Facebook friends have more access to knowledge of Islam and Muslim. As Kareem said:
“There are many kinds of information I like to share [from the page he was running], for example, the association’s activities, the new information of restaurants that have been issued halal food certification (清真食品認證) and the speeches I’m going to deliver in universities. I hope my friends or my friends’ friends would be attracted by my posts and want to know more about Islam and Muslim culture.”
The interviewees believe that when Taiwanese people possess more comprehensive understandings of Islam and Muslim, they will have a better chance to reverse the negative image against all Muslims, including themselves. To achieve this goal, the interviewees are willing to partly break the confines of stages. On one hand, they consider it a good way to enhance their personal image as sources of information. On the other hand, they believe letting their friends know that they are willing to
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introduce their religion and are actively involved in offline activities is also the best declaration of Muslim identity. As Mahmud said:
“I have never been afraid of revealing that I am a Muslim. I simply share everything I think is worth knowing.”
For the interviewees, to control the confines of public and private stages is an essential part of impression management. Yet they are fully aware that they can make the best of the fluidity of stages to achieve the goals of voicing for their identity. The core strategy of impression management is not only to fulfill the audiences’
expectation, but to let as many people as possible to see and to be convinced of their performance, no matter it is on the public page or private timelines.
6.4 Summary
This chapter discusses the affordances of various technological designs on Facebook.
To summarize this chapter, the interviewees developed several strategies of impression management using various Facebook functions. They employed the interactive communication functions of Facebook as tools of performing the self and the privacy setting tools as tools of managing the confines between various social stages.
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For performing the self, they mostly used the sharing function to provide third party produced news and knowledge about Islam and Muslim. This serves to construct comprehensive images of Muslims in front of the non-Muslim audience and meanwhile build their self-image as sources of correct information. Secondly, they tend to post photos, videos and even “check-in” in which they attend a Muslim gathering at mosques or other locations. They believe that the Islamic-featured scenes of their offline events can attract more non-Muslim audiences’ attention on Taiwanese Muslim community and Islamic culture. They are also aware that the daily interactions among them and their Muslim friends are part of performances showing their Muslim Identity because the semi-public environment of Facebook has caused context collapse. Among the interactive details, the interviewees believe Muslim women’s clothes in profile photos are often the best identity symbols for people to become aware of the presence of Muslim in public.
However, the context collapse gives the interviewees chances to improve skills of impression management as well. Using interactive functions such as “like” and commenting, they can benefit from observing audience reactions. With the tagging function, on the other hand, the confines of their stages might be broken by friends. It could damage their images in Muslim community.
Thus, for managing the confines between stages and performances, the interviewees employ custom friend lists and tagging review to maintain audience segregation.
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Through the custom friend list, they are able to give appropriate performances to differentiated audiences according to Muslim and non-Muslim customs so that their Muslim friends or the elders from family would not see them violating religious disciplines, mostly gender norms. Through the tagging review, they are able to make sure that their friends cannot arbitrarily make them give involuntary performances in front of their audiences. Some interviewees also manage to create Facebook pages and groups as new stages. Most of the new stages are created to achieve the purposes of providing information of Islam and Muslim and to enhance the cohesion of the Taiwanese Muslim community. Nevertheless, they also employ the contents on the pages as sources for more personalized performance of the self by sharing them on their own timelines.
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