Online Identity Essay

Sharing our feelings, likes, or dislikes on social media is quite the thing for many nowadays. Many individuals expose a certain personality throughout sites or apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and many more. For some, it is much easier to express emotion when they are behind screens. For others, there are simply boundaries or different personalities within real life and a cyber community. “We engage in impression management to present an ideal self to others” (Durden 2016). In some cases, those who remain close to us, such as family members, relatives, or friends, may have a contrary or distinct portrayal online than in person. To further explain presentations of corporeal and cyber identities my husband’s cyber self-identity will be analyzed by …show more content…
When online, boundaries outline what is accepted and what is not, what one may share and what must be kept to oneself. Authors Liam Bullingham and Ana C. Vasconcelos analyze online identities and interaction practices in 10 different cases of bloggers in the article The Presentation of Self in the Online World’: Goffman and the Study of Online Identities. They introduce the term: masking identity, which refers to non-revealing negative experiences that happen in everyday life. “Fear of negative behavior in interaction [may] be reduced by masking identity, as the act cannot be carried through to the offline person” (Bullingham and Vasconcelos 2013:108). Grief is one of several negative life experiences that are often not shared online. Unfortunately, my husband has lost several persons in his life, including his brother. Such tragic loss is a topic he rarely express through social media. As stated above, he does not like sharing many personal details or emotions. He uses his presentation of cyber-self as a mask. His portrayal of a non-cliché, humorous, and beer-loving male hide his grief and other