1. Media and Collective Identity
Facebook and Collective Narcissism

2. 845+ Million Users

3. 1.82 Billion 1.78 Billion
people access people access
the web by via web-
phone connected
PCs
The Guardian, Wednesday 14th April 2012

4. “A focus on Identity requires us to pay closer attention
to the ways in which media and technologies are used in
everyday life and their consequences for social groups”
David Buckingham

5. “Identity is complicated- everybody thinks they’ve got one”
David Gauntlett

6. What is Collective Identity?
Representation: the way reality is ‘mediated’ or ‘re-presented’ to us;
Collective Identity: the individual’s sense of belonging to a group (part of
personal identity).

7. Lots of research has focused on the ways in which people use Social Media Sites
(SMS) to construct a presentation or representation of themselves.
Two theorists:
David Buckingham “Youth, Identity and Digital Media”
Zizi Papacharissi “A Networked Self – Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites”

8. Thoughts on Social Media Sites:
“These network platforms of socially orientated activity permit an
introduction of the self via public displays of connection”
“A networked presentation of the self involves performative
elements, using a variety of tools and strategies to present
tastes, likes, dislikes, affiliations and in general, personality”
“Such a performative palette on sites like Facebook might
include listings of interests, posting of comments and responses,
and posting and labelling of photographs of one’s self and one’s
friends”
Mendelson & Papacharissi

9. “The manner in which college students portray themselves and tag
others through photographs on Facebook is a contemporary means of
introducing the self and performing one's identity.”
“College students consciously upload and tag displayed photographs,
thus selecting certain subjects and events to emphasise.”
This links with Chalfen's (1987) examination of “how we construct,
manipulate, interpret, live with, participate in, and generally use
visual symbolic forms.” The constructed nature of identity is
particularly interesting for this unit.
This ties in with Roland Barthes and Semiotics: certain visual signs or
symbols have a connotative value within Western society. They are
understood as possessing symbolic meaning – e.g. the Red rose is
symbolic of love; a tear is symbolic of sadness.

10. This part of the Collective Identity unit will give you the opportunity to
examine how visual imagery is employed to present the self and
everyday college life via Facebook.
You will study and interrogate the photographs college students
present of themselves as important forms of symbolic creation of
their worlds.

11. Let's start with some Facebook facts:
Are you average?

12. The Profile Picture

14. Are we missing any 'typical' profile pictures?
Look at your profile picture. What does it say
about you?
What about your friends? What is the
connotative meaning of their profile picture?
Does their profile picture match their 'real world'
identity?

15. In everyday life, people consciously and unconsciously work to define the
way they are perceived, hoping to engender positive impressions of
themselves
This effort entails emphasizing certain characteristics, through dress,
hairstyle, behaviour, and/or speech, while hiding or diminishing other
characteristics perceived as flawed, depending on the context.
Goffman (1959) uses the term “performance” to refer to “all the activity of a
given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way
any of the other participants”.
Contemporary scholars like David Buckingham agree with Goffman that
identity is performed; whether or not that performance is virtual or real,
offline or online.

16. Facebook Photos
Personal photographs dominate Facebook. Personal photographs are
photographs made by ourselves, members of our family, or peer group
for our own use, not by professional photographers and not for mass
audiences
We might think that personal photographs would be haphazard: just
point and shoot.
Chalfen (1987) and Musello (1980) argue that they are highly
ritualized and conventionalized, with a rather limited range of
subjects being recorded.

17. Personal photographs present ideals, emphasizing how we wish our
lives to be remembered (Holland, 1987).
According to Roland Barthes we therefore consciously and
subconsciously transform ourselves before the camera, portraying a
version of ourselves we hope to be (Barthes, 1981).
The positive is always recorded over the negative, with moments of
celebration emphasized (King, 1986; Slater, 1995).
“People give a performance when they allow themselves to be
photographed, in the sense that they make allowance for a public
that will ultimately see the photograph” (Boerdam & Martinius, 1980)

18. Qualitative Research: Facebook Photographs