Week 4 - Impression Management

This week's reading was Danah Boyd's article on "Why Youth Heart Myspace." This provided a great insight into the reasons that people use social networking websites and what they get out of them - it also led to some interesting discussions in class about this text and what the various things contained inside it meant. Something that particularly interested me was Boyd's interpretations and thoughts on impression management. She mentions "self-reflexivity, self-monitoring and imagining an audience" as being crucial to this impression management and after exploring this within both the online and offline worlds, it provides an interesting point of discussion.

Impression management is defined as being "part of a larger process where people seek to define a situation through their behaviour," or simply that people act in a certain way which is deemed socially acceptable in order to gain the acceptance of the people around them, and thus leave a positive impression. Both online and offline, we all use impression management and adapt socially in different situations, but it is those online interactions which can be much more controlled and tweaked in specific ways in order to impress or show off features about you which you want to use to fit in, or be liked for.

Whilst Boyd talked about MySpace in her article, in class we discussed Facebook - as it is much more widely used now than MySpace is. Whilst Facebook is lacking the extreme customisation that MySpace had on its profiles (through the entire page design being exploited), its uniform profiles mean that impression management has to be done on a more subtle level, through things such as text, profile pictures or the personal information you allow yourself to disclose.

We realised that as we know who our audience (or friends list) is, we know how to act around them and judge what would be seen as a socially acceptable status for example. This kind of impression management shows awareness of our audiences online and lets us control what we say and what people see of us in order to promote the most positive sides of our personalities. The same thing applies for picture tagging. When you see pictures of yourself on Facebook - it is not always a positive idea to tag them, as this may give a negative impression of you or your behaviour. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent as University admission boards, or workplaces checking applications are starting to use social media to check up on their applicants and make judgemental decisions on them.

There are many, many different ways in which social media like MySpace and Facebook can be manipulated in order to give out the right impression of yourself socially, and thus they cannot all be explained. However, the two above examples combined with what Boyd wrote about in her article provide a great insight into how impression management works, and specifically on the internet. As the internet is providing us all with brand new ways of socially interacting with people, it seems right that we are all adapting to this and using tools such as impression management to keep socialising on the internet a positive thing for ourselves that doesn't end up ruining relationships and so on.