Social Network Identify: Facebook, Twitter, and Identity Negotiation Theory

Social Network Identify: Facebook, Twitter, and Identity Negotiation Theory

Kaskazi, A. (2014). Social Network Identity: Facebook, Twitter and Identity Negotiation Theory. In iConference 2014 Proceedings (p. 858 – 859). doi:10.9776/14276

Research Advisor: Lynette Kvasny, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University

The use of social networking sites (SNS) has had implications in traditional areas of communication such as identity and relationship construction. This study explores how identity is expressed on Facebook and Twitter, the top two most trafficked SNS (Brenner, 2013). Specifically, this study reports the finding of a survey of young adults who use these sites. Respondents were asked questions about what prompts them to choose how they express their identity on Facebook and how/if it differs from identity expression using Twitter. In addition this study examines how Facebook and Twitter can be understood through the sociological theory of identity negotiation. Implications for the connection between social digital identity and “catfishing” are provided and discussed.

Presented at iConference 2014