Personal Social Media Analysis

According to www.merriam-webster.com, a persona is “the way you behave and talk with other people that causes them to see you as a particular kind of person. It is an image or personality that a person presents to other people.” A persona is easy for a person to construct when they are on social media. When an individual gets behind a computer screen, they can easily become any type of person they want, whether it is their realistic selves or someone who is the complete opposite of them. These individuals have the ability to post pictures, videos, and quotes to have their audience view them in a certain way that they want to be perceived. In this essay, I will be analyzing my own social media accounts to exhibit the salient identities that …show more content…
There are many contrasting situations that can impact the way that one conveys themselves through social media. This is known as a salient identity. Depending on the situation that is brought up, an individual can commit to a different identity to fit the role they want to perceive to other people. Alessandra Micalizzi (2014) states in the article Cyber-Self, “the Internet can be considered an identity technology, one of the available ‘digitalized extroversions of psychological process, through which every …show more content…
In the book, What is Social Media, by Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey (2014), the author writes, “social media is a collection of websites and applications designed to build and enhance online communities for networking and sharing information” (p. 55). Relating this back to my social media sites, the network that I have created for myself is largely due to how active I am on the site and the persona that I have created for myself. Looking back at my network of friends, I appear to have a considerable amount of friends that all fall under the same type of category. The persona that I want others to perceive is that I am very satisfied with my life. I post many pictures on Instagram that display my life to be very cheerful. I love to post pictures of friends and family, the places I travel, and the tasty food that I come across. As I look at a few of my friend’s profiles, I noticed that they generally post the same images as I do. The persona that one posts generally has a network of followers with similar interests and personas for the reason that we are all trying to accomplish the same things on our social media sites. Personally, I know I often look at other people’s profiles that have similar interests and personas to me. This creates a network for me to be a part