Self Branding on Social Media Platforms

**Ekas Rai**

### **What is my topic?**

This study explores the tensions of authenticity in digital culture by focusing on social media profiles on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and their correlation to the person’s true self-identity. In many regards contemporary culture is constantly perceived as framing the self in relation to beliefs of authenticity and as digital culture is increasingly able to feedback lifestyles, tastes and meanings onto users through the emergence of social media platforms and the notion of ‘self-branding’, questions of authenticity begin to surface furthermore. Therefore many discussions of consumption and production in the media industry tend to focus on what behaviours and attitudes towards objects (Facebook ‘likes’, twitter ‘following’) are considered genuine or authentic reflections of self and culture.

This project predominantly focuses on the affects of diverse social media platforms’ interface designs on people’s representations of self and explores the dynamics of the audiences involved in self-branding and attempts to categorize and correlate the genre of various self-identities evident on social media platforms to the type of audiences using those identities to represent their ‘desired self’

## **Research Question(s)**

How does the technique of self-branding facilitated by social media platforms’ narrative and story telling interfaces impact one’s authentic self?

How is the commodification of self augmented by social media platforms’ interface architecture?

How can the social networking profiles of people on diverse interfaces of social networking sites be seen as performances of self rather than representations of true self?

## **Related Works**

### **Forms of Labor**

In the mainstream media and culture industry, notions of self-branding, self-production and self-identity have been of focus ever since the emergence of social networking websites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The vitality of these notions has grown immensely ever since the contemporary market began to identify ‘self’ as a commodity. In an earlier study Hearn gives these conceptions a new direction by categorizing them as ‘forms of labor’(Hearn, 2008). She argues that the ‘self’ has explicitly become a form of labor by engaging in reflexive self-branding (Hearn, 2008). In order to strengthen the argument she uses Michel Foucault’s insight that ‘nothing in man-not even his body- is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’(Hearn, 2008). The idea suggested by the argument is that the self is perceived as something made, produced and conditioned by our body and being.

### **Authenticity in Social Media Profiles**

The predominant growth of personal branding through different mediated forms and states that branded persona has been identified as a central strategy of various corporate companies (Hearn, 2008). Companies are extracting data in high numbers from consumer content that it has blurred the line between a product and consumer, as people are acting as a product and consumer simultaneously. The logic and practice of self-branding has evolved immensely on social networking sites such as Facebook, which is regarded as ‘inventories of various kinds of selves’

The logic and practice of self-branding has evolved immensely on social networking sites such as Facebook, which she regards as ‘inventories of various kinds of selves’ (Hearn, 2008).  The self has definitely become a brand and the production of self always involves some form of labor from users creating a public persona (Hearn, 2008). With the constant branding of self, people have developed a ‘flexible personality’, which is solely focused on attracting attention both at cultural and monetary levels (Hearn, 2008).

### **Social Media Platform Architecture**

Social media platforms’ architectures have evolved to become tools of personal story telling and narrative self-representation (Dijck, 2013). An ideal example is Facebook’s timeline integration, which provides a chronological showcase of one’s life events/interactions/achievements (Dijck, 2013).Social networking platforms are shifting their center of gravity from connectedness to connectivity by integrating principles of ‘friending’, ‘liking’, ‘connecting’ and ‘following’ in their interfaces (Dijck, 2013). By incorporating these elements, social media technologies are translating people, ideas and things into algorithms in order to steer online performance thereby causing the existence of multiple identities (Dijck, 2013).

## **References**

Hearn, A. (2008). `Meat, Mask, Burden`: Probing the contours of the branded `self`. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 197-217. doi:10.1177/1469540508090086

Van Dijck, J. (2013). "You have one identity": performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media, Culture & Society, 35(2), 199-215. doi:10.1177/0163443712468605