Skip to main content

The Structured Self: Facebook and Social Identity

Please join us for a brown-bag lunch seminar on Facebook and identity with Angela Cirucci

 

DATE: Tuesday, Sept 16

TIME: 12 - 1:30 p.m.

LOCATION: Davis Hall Room 106

 

In her recent project, The Structured Self, Angela investigates social networking sites’ structural affordances and their influence on identity creation, maintenance, performance, broadcast, and comprehension by employing Facebook as a case study. Facebook is recognized as an “ethic,” or as a mediator, that applies moral choices when filtering user input that is then displayed and aggregated through the site. Thus, the Facebook structure and its promoted cultures have implications for the many important aspects of the identification process, namely authenticity, agency, and anonymity. Angela attempts to reimagine these concepts through both a structural discourse analysis of the site and through focus group and one-on-one interviews with emerging adult users.

 

Questions addressed in this lecture will include:

 

  • What affordances are offered by Facebook for the identification process?
  • In what ways does Facebook’s structure privilege certain aspects of the identification process over others?
  • How do users perceive of the structure and its affordances?
  • How do users define notions of identity, authenticity, agency, and anonymity?

More generally, she will discuss her proposition that all social media researchers should apply a more rigorous analysis of the digital spaces they are examining.

 

Angela M. Cirucci is a PhD Candidate in Temple University’s School of Media and Communication and a Researcher for the University’s new Digital Scholarship Center. Her research focuses on the impact that digital social spaces have on identification performances. You can learn more about her atwww.angelacirucci.com.