Impression Management In Social Media: Discussion

Identity Performance through Impression Management

Discuss about the Impression Management in Social Media.

Yes someone can change his or her identity through performance. Identity performance is our process of expressing ourselves to others through cloths, speech, facial expression and movements (Wittkower, 2014). With the revolution of social media identity performance through impression management has found many other ways (Paliszkiewicz & M?dra-sawicka, 2016). Their performance on the social media can create their identity. However there are challenges because through the digital medium the identity that someone is trying to build might get misinterpreted. For example a man through his performance on the digital platform might build up an identity of a woman. In recent times the transformation of Caitlyn Jenner can be good example of how not just gender transformation but also her performance on social media established her identity (Caldwell, 2016).

Homophily is human’s tendency to associate themselves with the people of similar attitudes, interests, values, personality and background (Cook, 2014). The effect of peers has great influence over the people who belong to modern generation. The people show the signs of mirroring more than ever, where they are mimicking movements, vernacular and behavior of others knowingly or unknowingly. One good instance where homophily can have good impact is quitting smoking. Research has demonstrated that quitting smoking is more effective if that is initiated within a group (Hitchman et al., 2014). If a friend shows strong will to quit smoking that positively impact on the other friends too. On the other hand there are instances where homophily affects people negatively like in health related issues. If one’s friend gains weight his perspective towards heavy people is more likely to be changed and gaining weight becomes more socially acceptable for him (Huffingtonpost.com, 2011).

Hate speech can be defined as a communication that expresses only hatred towards certain groups or communities and generally intended to provoke violence. Most hate speech is comprised of racial, religious or ethnic commentaries to offend the addressed communities (Waseem & Hovy, 2016). Some hate speech aim to threat, insult, terrorize, degrade and attack individuals and therefore it is different from regular speech. If the hate speech is intended to hurt someone it should be punishable by law. On the other hand when freedom of speech is concerned there is a scope of further consideration and discussion (Djuric et al., 2015). The area of offense is quite complicated as certain speech may hurt certain segments of society but it might not actually be hate speech. However every person has a freedom of voice but as hate speech offends or hurts people it must be treated differently.

Homophily and its impact

The cultural capital makes use of the non-economic resources in order to enable the social mobility of the people. It includes the knowledge and the skills, which helps in building the best part of the social structure. Social networks are being adhered to by the cultural capital as a base for linking the likeminded people of the organization (Yang, Liu & Wei, 2016). The economic capital, on the other hand, depends on the monetary transactions that is undertaken in order to understand the exchange value of the commodities that are being purchased. The social capital makes use of the networks of the relationships among the people thereby helping the society to understand and the effective functioning of the society. The social networks help in the integration of the ideas, which enables the society to function as per the requirements of the inhabitants of the particular society. The functions of the SNS help in undertaking the basics of the networking and thereby help in making the society strong. The inclusion of the cultural and the social capital packed with the economic resources helps in the proper functioning of the society. The Social media networking helps in the making the society strong and educated at the same time.

At times, a person suffering from headache might not work out as the consequences that the person might face as a result of a chronic headache is huge, thereby hampering the working schedule and the dependence on the factors of the process. in order to understand the nature of the headache, as to the tenacity of the headache or the timeliness helps in determining the majority of the headache. The headache that is being suffered by the person must be assessed according to the particular time in which it inflicts its blow on the person or the feeble condition the person is subjected to at the time of the headache. Determining the following factors can be helpful in understanding the nature and the necessity of classifying the headache under the chronic or the general backdrop.

This year in June, Canada experienced a social media controversy about race discrimination. The controversy started after Annie Villeneuve’s road show at St. Fete nationale parade in Montreal on 24^th June (Montrealgazette.com, 2017). A video posted on Facebook showed that Villeneuve’s float is being pushed by all people of color and behind the float a group of choir members wearing all white. The video was shared more than 12000 times within a day and received thousands of comments (Ctvnews.ca, 2017).Though the boys who were pushing the float are students of local school and athletic team and belong to diverse ethnic group. Though the organizers apologized but claimed to be an anti racist group and experienced great trouble because of the controversy over social media.

Hate speech and its impact

Five female celebrities on social media are Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga and Beyonce and five male celebrities on social media are Justin Bieber, Cristiano Ronaldo, Barack Obama, Will Smith and Dwayane Johnson. The selected celebrities are few of the most famous celebrities online so they all have millions have followers on the platform. For the female celebrities it is generally noticed that most comments are from male members and it is also noticeable that female celebrities tend to respond more often than the male celebrities. The female celebrities try to connect with their followers more than the male celebrities. Male celebrities on the other hand react towards politics more than females. I think it is the individual identity performance through managing their impressions.

No it is not okay for a single platform to have monopoly. Companies like Facebook or Google control most of the market and acts like new masters of the global economy. Facebook and Google both connect to its users, developers and advertisers. Google rules the search engines and Facebook controls the social media. Though the differences do not matter when monopoly is concerned. The monopoly of such business giants does not allow any competitors so other companies struggle to exist (Baran, Fietkiewicz & Stock, 2015). Their dominance is evident if one follows how Facebbok changed the business of WhatsApp and Instagram. Apart from gobbling up smaller organizations the companies possessing monopoly power have other negative impacts as well, like inequality in wages and weakening private investment.

The problems faced by the homogenous people in accordance to the other heterogeneous people can be enumerated in the following ways. The basic differentiation is being based on the preference of the people and thereby affects the sociable nature of the homogenous people. In a biased social structure the homogenous people gets a very few advantage of socializing effectively (Phillips, 2014). The society being biased keeps the people away from the social structure. In a society that has already accepted the homogenous nature of the certain people are privileged enough  to affirm their preferences and mingle indifferently with the people at large. Human beings are sociable beings, living in the society. The reforms in the society has brought about a change in the probable cases of the homogenous people, but in certain underdeveloped or developing regions, the practices to keep the homogenous people are prevalent.

Cultural Capital, Social Capital and Economic Capital

Different kind of network power exists in a network like the Networking power, Network power, Networked power, Network making power and Counter power. Social network is also a structure consists of social actors that can be both individuals and organizations (Westaby, Pfaff & Redding, 2014). Networking power can be influenced by certain social influences, for example in Western society the social media is part of daily life more than Asian society. Platforms like Facebook or Google acts as the dominant actors on the digital networking. The network structure provides the various actors with various roles and responsibilities and by applying certain strategies they achieve their desired goals.

Social Networking Sites are basically platforms like Facebook or Twitter brings people of similar interests together. The social media helps everyone to gather information about others and according to those they build up relevant relationships. The awareness about the social issues or advancements is shared with others easily through social network. On the other side, the personal information available on Facebook can be used against social relationships (Ellison et al., 2014). However social network can successfully builds social capital through the connection, bonding and relationship it offers. Like on Facebook the relationship generally gets established among people who know each other in real life but on Twitter more number of people gets connected to each other even when they are lacking any existing connections.

Reference

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Caldwell, L. N. (2016). Transgender experiences: using the media to highlight the complexities of gender.

Cook, D. (2014, July). Identity Multipliers and the Mistaken Twittering of “Birds of a Feather”. In Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Cyber warefare and Security: ECCWS(p. 42).

CTVNews. (2017). Float in Montreal parade sparks allegations of racism. [online] Available at: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/float-in-montreal-parade-sparks-allegations-of-racism-1.3475367 [Accessed 10 Oct. 2017].

Djuric, N., Zhou, J., Morris, R., Grbovic, M., Radosavljevic, V., & Bhamidipati, N. (2015, May). Hate speech detection with comment embeddings. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 29-30). ACM.

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Hoffman, A. (2011). You Think For Yourself but You Act Like Your Friends (on homophily). [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/auren-hoffman/you-think-for-yourself-bu_b_182605.html [Accessed 10 Oct. 2017].

Montreal Gazette. (2017). Fête nationale committee apologizes for unintentionally racist parade float. [online] Available at: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/fete-nationale-committee-apologizes-for-parade-float-race-controversy [Accessed 10 Oct. 2017].

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Waseem, Z., & Hovy, D. (2016, June). Hateful Symbols or Hateful People? Predictive Features for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter. In [email protected] HLT-NAACL (pp. 88-93).

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