9

How Social Media Shape Identities

and Discourses in Professional Digital
Settings: Self-Communication
or Self-Branding?
Sandra Petroni

9.1 Introduction
The ubiquitous nature of Web 2.0, its collaborative and participatory
culture (Jenkins, 2006), and the pursuit of shareability have led users to
remediate1 their processes of meaning-making as well as their methods of
self-presentation (Goffman, 1959), whether they refer to personal or to
corporate profiles (Chouliaraki & Morsing, 2009).
Social networking practices which give rise to new models of identity
construction are so deeply embedded in our daily routines that we are no
longer able to separate our Self performed in a private or in a public
semiosphere, whether our Self is offline or ‘always on’, as Naomi Baron
claimed in 2008. Over the last decade, digital spaces are the arenas where
traditional and new social practices have been reshaped.

S. Petroni (*)
School of Humanities, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy
e-mail: sandra.petroni@uniroma2.it

© The Author(s) 2019 251

P. Bou-Franch, P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), Analyzing Digital Discourse,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92663-6_9
252 S. Petroni

Most of these processes are instantiated by the presence of the

‘consumer culture’ (Featherstone, 2007; Singh, 2011) which pervades
and cuts across all digital domains. This occurs for two reasons. First, the
main property of the Web is that of being a hyperdomain where the
Greek prefix hyper- stands for its capability to conflate different domains
by blurring their borders, going beyond borders. Being hyper is the inevi-
table condition of the digital world. The Web setting is a hyperdomain
because it merges different practices from different domains within each
single digital artifact, such as a site or a profile in a social network. This
means that the digital domain should be seen as a ‘blended’ domain
stemming from the functions which are fulfilled simultaneously during a
meaning-making process, and one of these functions is mainly “promo-
tional” (Petroni, 2011, p. 73). In social media networks, but also in com-
munity blogs, due to their collaborative nature and their shareability,
human interactions are shaped following patterns of community practice
which entail alignment, affiliation (Zappavigna, 2012) and sometimes
loyalty. Generally, these processes require ‘appreciation’ (Martin & White,
2005), for example, liking or rating systems from the community. To be
positively appreciated requires the use of persuasive and promotional dis-
cursive strategies (Cook, 2012) but this is not necessarily a conscious
process in social media interactions.
The second reason resides in information itself. Since we are wit-
nesses to a process called ‘informalization’ of public discourse, as
Fairclough (1992, 1995) argues, and since this implies a transformation
in style and register within communicative practices, it is possible to
claim that this striking and pervasive phenomenon is today further sup-
ported by the advent of new digital media. In fact, new communication
technologies have been directly involved in the process of informaliza-
tion and globalization: on the one hand, private styles have crossed bor-
ders into public, official and business situations; on the other, the public
domain seems to invade private domain practices. The way digital media
have been developed and consumed by the global audience reflects a
precise purpose that is of ‘commodifying’ the information conveyed
through them. In 1992, Fairclough, in his discussion of institutional
and social domains, claims,
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 253

[…] the process whereby social domains and institutions, whose concern is
not producing commodities in the narrower economic sense of goods for
sale, come nevertheless to be organized and conceptualized in terms of
commodity production, distribution and consumption. […] In terms of
orders of discourse, we can conceive of commodification as the coloniza-
tion of institutional orders of discourse, and more broadly of the societal
order of discourse, by discourse types associated with commodity produc-
tion. (1992, p. 207)

Consequently, with information being a commodity, the representa-

tion of technology, by which information is produced, distributed and
consumed, merges two basic functions that are informative and persuasive
and tends to be informal in order to popularize its consumption and to be
perceived as user-friendly. The commodification of information points to
its consequential ‘marketization’. Thus, persuasive, evaluative and descrip-
tive rhetorical actions, characterizing promotional genres and settings, are
often present and integrated in the meaning-making process on the Web,
be it instantiated in a site or an interface (Petroni, ibid., p. 74).
These processes also affect social network environments where self-pro-
filing is the predominant aim and the most far-reaching consequence of
this mechanism is the construction of ‘commodified identities’ thanks to
the processes of self-promotion and self-branding (Herring & Kapidzic,
2015; Page, 2012). In Fairclough’s terms, ‘self-promotion is becoming part-
and-parcel of self-identity […] in contemporary society’ (1995, p. 140).
Moreover, digital technologies play a crucial role since, thanks to their
affordances (Gibson, 1977), they can affect users’ habits and values and
push them to consume digital products or endorse digital actions accord-
ing to well-established algorithmic frameworks which envisage precise
behaviors. There is, in fact, a branch of computing science called
Persuasive Technology (Fogg, 2003, 2009) which allows any interactive
product to be designed with the aim to change attitudes or behaviors by
making desired outcomes easier to achieve. Thus, we find persuasion
attempts in many clicks in the online world. Potentially, most digital
artifacts have a persuasive purpose and their creators intend to affect user
attitudes or behaviors in some way: sign up for service, tell a friend about
this video and enter your email address, and all these actions occur thanks
to a simple click (Petroni, 2016).
254 S. Petroni

More importantly, this ‘algorithmic ideology’ (Amoore, 2011; Cheney-

Lippold, 2011) is adopted by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other
social networks which in turn are governed by the world’s most hidden,
commercial and political interests. From this viewpoint, social media
platforms decide the value of information, construct users’ worlds and
the identities they perform in this process. In fact, in LinkedIn, for exam-
ple, reputation building and networking, two of the main techniques of
digital self-branding (Isaksson & Jørgensen, 2010; Wenger, 1999), rely
more on the interactivity technologies designed and embedded in the
platform architecture rather than on what professionals write in their
short resumes or CVs.
This premise is necessary to place and contextualize the processes and
practices that will be analyzed and discussed in the following sections.
The current study in fact focuses on how users discursively present and
promote themselves in a professional digital setting, namely, LinkedIn,
and how social media technology affects user’s agency and, as a conse-
quence, their identity construction. Of course, both facets entail social
and psychological implications which arise from the transformation of
selves, as isolated personae, into ‘networked selves’ (Papacharissi, 2011),
or rather, as identities performed exclusively in combination with other
social connections.

9.2 Theoretical Rationale and Literature

Review
9.2.1 LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s founding mission was to provide recruitment and advertising

services to corporations and agencies, although initially its aim was to
help professionals to connect to each other. LinkedIn is the largest profes-
sional networking site in the world. The brand name itself accounts for
the mission of this platform since the two words (the past participle
Linked and the preposition In) represent the crucial principle of social
networking: users must be present on the platform but it is necessary for
them to be present by providing and consuming updated information
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 255

(the fact that they are linked in describes users as being integrated into
the platform). Therefore, LinkedIn functions as a front-stage environ-
ment (using Goffman’s metaphor) where the members’ professional iden-
tity is performed.
It was launched in 2003, and today, with over 400 million members
worldwide, precisely located in 200 countries, and with a rate of 2 new
profiles per second (Nishar, 2014; Sordello, 2014). More than 80% of its
users are aged between 36 and 45 years, although the average is decreas-
ing over time (Archambault & Grudin, 2012) while the recruiting prac-
tices employing LinkedIn have been increased constantly.2 In fact, the
traditional recruiting process based on the classic recruitment agencies
has changed significantly over the last few years. Traditionally, companies
provided their potential applicants with a position description via recruit-
ers (Joos, 2008; Lee, 2005). In turn, applicants had to respond with an
extremely careful edited resume, adapt it to that precise position, and
include only relevant information. Candidate’s identity and credibility
could hence be built only within the boundaries established by the orga-
nization/recruiter through the position description. There was only a pri-
vate company-to-applicant communication and vice versa, and for this
reason the resume could be changed or refined according to the diverse
position applications.
In LinkedIn, candidates have their profile posted and edited within the
boundaries set by the platform, and it is composed of different facets but
only one resembles, in terms of discursive style, the traditional resume,
namely, the summary section. The other components of a traditional CV
such as Education, Experience, Interests, Additional Info, Volunteer
Experiences, Honors and Awards, Publications, Projects and so on are
parts of the profile and have dedicated sections to be completed with con-
cise and brief narratives. On the one hand, a profile is a continuously
updated Web presence (Schawbel, 2013), but on the other is less flexible
to various position descriptions at the same time. Professionals in fact have
to possess a new set of skills in order to recreate and manage their personal
brand in broader boundaries (Labrecque, Markos, & Milne, 2011).
Furthermore, they are required to receive recommendations, to join
groups (related to their professional fields), to follow influencers and to be
updated and informed on top conversations from their connections—
256 S. Petroni

including people they are following—via the new ‘Trending Storyline’

link. Since this amount of information becomes visible and transparent,
prior positions, background, network and endorsements are well exhib-
ited and ready to be analyzed by recruiters, influential people and unin-
tended audiences (Stutzman & Hartzog, 2012). For this reason, it has
been also claimed that information displayed on LinkedIn profile pages is
more reliable and accurate (Brouer, Stefanone, Badawy, & Egnoto, 2015)
and less misleading (Guillory & Hancock, 2012) compared with that pro-
vided by classic CVs.
Therefore, effectiveness and credibility rely on how users promote
themselves, on how they communicate to the broader audience and if
they are able to create a network and increase their connections (Kampf,
Broillet, & Emad, 2014). Peters claims that personal branding requires
professionals to go beyond the classic resume and to become able to ‘mar-
ketize’ instead their skills, and build what Peters (1997) calls ‘the brand
You’. This is precisely the social role LinkedIn should play: to make all
public profile information visible to the global networks of society.
Additionally, LinkedIn profiles also become new information sources
that can be retrieved or linked to by external websites, and these proce-
dures are supported by the Google general search engine where LinkedIn
has a great Web authority (Kelly & Delasalle, 2012). The fact that
LinkedIn profiles are accessible via URLs makes the conversion of these
personal data into units suitable for link analysis possible. As Orduna-
Malea, Font and Ontalba-Ruipérez (2017, p. 128) state, ‘LinkedIn
appears as a cybermetric feasible websource’ that can analyze professional-
company interactions.
Self-profiling in online public spaces has also been the object of study
of socio-cognitivists (Fiske & Tylor, 2013; Tomlinson, 2016), and what
has emerged is that LinkedIn allows users to make a distinction between
the ‘ought self ’ and the ‘ideal self ’, respectively, who one is expected to be
according to the conceptualizations of appropriate versus inappropriate
behaviors, and ‘who one wants to be’ (Fiske & Tylor, 2013, p. 130).
As seen so far, a large part of the literature devoted to LinkedIn arises
from marketing studies, business and corporate communication, as well as
from psychology, sociology, social psychology and Social Cognition Theory.
Building identities and reputation in digital settings are however social
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 257

practices that also have their discursive and linguistic dimensions (Ellison,
Heino, & Gibbs, 2006; Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2007; Hargittai, 2008;
Herring, 2013; Hoffmann, 2012; Marwick, 2013; Thurlow & Mroczek,
2011). Unfortunately, with the exception of a few studies focused on the
promotional discursive resources (Díez Prados & Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2015)
employed within this specific ‘virtual marketplace’ (Page, 2012) by the pro-
fessionals and by those who recommend them, there is little evidence of
linguistic analyses aimed at identifying the main promotional language
markers used to write the summary section only.

9.2.2 S
 elf-Presentation, Identity Construction
and Reputation Building in Social Media

Social media are a fertile ground for personal and professional identity
construction. The functionality of the Web 2.0 platform, that is, its tech-
nical affordances, is not a matter of a technical updating if compared to
the Web 1.0 system but rather a new way of experiencing this system in
terms of agency. It encourages users to be progressively engaged with
broader and more powerful forms of global communication where iden-
tities need to be renegotiated constantly. As Jenkins states, ‘all human
identities are by definition social identities. Identifying ourselves or oth-
ers is a matter of meaning, and meaning always involves interaction:
agreement and disagreement, convention and innovation, communica-
tion and negotiation’ (2014, p. 18).
Creating profiles and accounts, opening blogs, taking part in social
networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or sharing media files on
YouTube, Flickr or Instagram means, on the one hand, to post comments,
share photos and connect with friends and professionals; on the other, it
means that these actions definitely recontextualize users’ identities in
these new contexts and users ‘perform’ their identity, in Goffman’s terms.
Goffman’s original framework (1959) is of great utility as an analytical
framework for investigating identity through interaction and self-pre-
sentation in the digital world. By using metaphors taken from drama-
turgy, Goffman theorized a new conceptualization of identity
construction in the study of human interaction. In his influential work,
258 S. Petroni

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he studied interpersonal

interactions and how participants perform their actions aimed at pro-
jecting a desirable image that will be their public self-image, their face
(Goffman, 1967). In interactions, individuals are seen as actors that act
on the front stage of their lives and are perfectly aware of being observed
by an audience. For this reason, they perform by following social rules
and conventions, hoping to improve their reputation. On the backstage,
they live their private stories without any performance.
Although computer-mediated communication spaces and social net-
works are nonphysical online environments for social interaction,
Goffman’s framework is still applicable to digital interactions. Social
media interactions go beyond the virtual dimension of the Web and regain
their ‘trueness’, the real face-to face dimension, since multimedia features
such as photos, videos, gadgets, music, friends’ lists and links to others’
social networking profiles are identity markers which surrogate the physi-
cal interplay. According to Jenkins, these features are ‘perhaps, among the
most elaborate examples of impression management that one can imag-
ine’ (2010, p. 264).
Along with self-presentation and impression management (Darics &
Koller, 2017; Gardner & Martinko, 1988; Goffman, 1959; Leary &
Kowalski, 1990), reputation is another concept extremely close to self-
presentation and at the same time is a highly fluid and fortuitous attri-
bute deriving from the perception, attention and approval by others.
Building a reputation entails a constant process of image-making and
impression management and, as such, can be continuously renegotiated
and adapted to the situation. Historically, one’s reputation had to dem-
onstrate and display clearly the inherent quality of a person’s work or
achievement, a variable that is extremely dependent on contextual, cul-
tural, institutional and economic factors. In social networks, the acquisi-
tion of reputation has very little to do with any specific competence or
talent since it is mostly related to users’ ability of attention-catching
online, including expressing opinions, values, establishing connections
and so on (Rodden, 2006). Reputation is a cultural product, and as such
is affected by its mode of production. This is thus totally immersed in the
traditional ‘promotional culture’ (Wernick, 1991) produced by the wide-
spread use of the processes of promotion and marketing. Goods, services,
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 259

information and, most centrally, people are all involved in a promotional

culture. Wernick describes this phenomenon as ‘a subject that promotes
itself, constructs itself for others in line with the competitive imaging
needs of the market. Just like any other artificially imaged commodity,
then, the resultant construct is a persona produced for public consump-
tion’ (Wernick, 1991, p. 192).
When users construct their reputations in a global open-access envi-
ronment, for example, in a social network such as LinkedIn, they show
themselves to a networked public (boyd, 2011; Zappavigna, 2012) and
the transformation of selves, as isolated personae, into ‘networked selves’
(Papacharissi, 2011) inevitably carries implications in terms of agency. As
Herring and Kapidzic state, ‘[s]elf-presentation is generally considered to
be motivated by a desire to make a favorable impression on others, or an
impression that corresponds to one’s ideals. As such, self-presentation is
centrally involved in impression management and the projection of an
online identity […]’ (2015, p. 146).
Recent studies (Krämer & Winter, 2008) show that among the most
cogent reasons to host an online personal profile are self-expression and
impression management. Identity construction has been speculated as a
public process that implies both ‘identity announcement’ made by the
individual claiming that identity and ‘identity placement’ made by others
who endorse and empower the claimed identity through digital anchored
relationships (Rosenberg, 1986; Zhao, Grasmuck, & Martin, 2008).
Social networks can be defined as popular stages for self-expression, com-
munication and self-promotion. For example, Facebook is particularly ori-
ented to facilitate personal self-presentation, whereas LinkedIn meets the
need for professional self-promotion. Originally, networks such as
Facebook or MySpace were generally considered as spaces for personal self-
expression and for establishing connections between friends. Depending
on the platform, and how this supports self-expression, and on the target
audience, users have progressively developed techniques of online self-
presentation and are becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of social
networks as tools for professional self-promotion and self-branding.
Additionally, online social networking discursive practices have given
rise to methods of self-presentation and reputation building which in turn
may offer a stage for representing forms of narcissism and self-esteem, as
260 S. Petroni

many social and psychological studies demonstrate. Narcissism refers to a

personality trait reflecting an extravagant and sometimes augmented self-
concept (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008), but this is not necessarily negative.
In fact, there are different forms of narcissism and this phenomenon must
be seen as if it moves along a continuum where the (−) pole represents the
natural and often spontaneous personality trait that refers to an individu-
al’s positive self-perception, whereas the opposite (+) pole reflects an over-
estimated positive and exaggerated self-view of agentive traits like superior
intelligence, strong power and physical attractiveness as well as a pervasive
sense of uniqueness (Emmons, 1984) and entitlement (Campbell, Bonacci,
& Shelton, 2004), which can be transformed into pathological traits of
extreme narcissism and mental disorder, but this study does not focus on
them obviously. Basically, narcissism is correlated with a high degree of
extraversion/agency (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004; Campbell, Rudich, &
Sedikides, 2002; Gabriel, Critelli, & Ee, 1994; John & Robins, 1994) and
a low level of agreeableness or communion (e.g. Miller & Campbell, 2008;
Paulhus & Williams, 2002). As Buffardi and Campbell claim:

these on line communities may be an especially fertile ground for narcis-

sists to self-regulate via social connections for two reasons. First, narcissists
function well in the context of shallow (as opposed to emotionally deep
and committed) relationships. […] Second, social networking Web pages
are highly controlled environments (Vazire & Gosling, 2004). Owners
have complete power over self-presentation on Web pages, unlike most
other social contexts. In particular, one can use personal Web pages to
select attractive photographs of oneself or write self-descriptions that are
self-promoting. (2008, p. 1304)

Needless to say, narcissism is not the sole reason that motivates partici-
pation in these social media sites.
Self-esteem is described as a person’s overall self-evaluation of their
value. Implicit and explicit self-esteem are subtypes of self-esteem.
Implicit self-esteem is an automatic, unconscious self-evaluation; explicit
self-esteem is a more conscious, reflective self-evaluation. According to
Mehdizadeh, ‘[r]egardless of the type of self-esteem, one of the most per-
vasive facts about this construct is that all humans have a vital need to
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 261

maintain and/or raise it in both online and offline social settings’ (2010,
p. 358). ‘Friending’, ‘liking’, ‘commenting’, ‘connecting’, ‘endorsing’ and
so on are only some of the specific agentive practices carried out on social
networks in this respect.
Narcissism and self-esteem fuel self-promotion and self-branding, and
these have also become normalized and well-accepted phenomena in
ordinary people’s lives (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). Most online identi-
ties are thus often shaped by exploiting the same strategies as those used
by celebrities (Marwick, 2013; Page, 2012; Rein, Kotler, & Shields,
2006), corporations and professionals (Ward & Yates, 2013) to promote
themselves. In doing so, users hope to gain popularity and hopefully
reach an appropriate level of recognition, reputation and connectedness
(Ward & Yates, 2013; Zappavigna, 2012).
Today, online platforms and their affordances have allowed personal
branding to be transformed into an important marketing task for ordi-
nary users. Potentially, they are able to manage their own brand and they
can even be their own marketers (Peters, 1997). This is at the basis of
personal branding. Furthermore, if individuals do not manage their own
face, that is, the individual’s public self-image, someone else will do it for
them, giving the power to others and ‘chances are that their brand descrip-
tion won’t be what you have in mind’ (Kaputa, 2005, p. 8). Literature has
also discussed the marketization of identity in terms of personal branding
(e.g. Labrecque et al., 2011; Lair, Sullivan, & Cheney, 2005). In the age
of Web 2.0, self-branding strategies imply building reputation, creating
and maintaining social networking profiles but also using search engine
optimization techniques to boost access to one’s information (Labrecque
et al., 2011, p. 39).

9.2.3 Self-Branding and Technology

Today, social media offer a new ‘protocol’ for social relations which is
inscribed in the technologies and affordances provided by the system.
They allow individuals’ personal connections to become more perma-
nent, presentational, ever broader and, most importantly, public. As
Hearn claims:
262 S. Petroni

[n]ot only can we see the numbers of relationships a person has, but we can
assess their quality and conduct as well; […]. With the emergence of pub-
licly available information about a person’s affective bonds, we get a sense
of their total social impact, an amalgam of their digital activity, which can
then be measured, rationalized, and represented as their ‘digital reputation’.
(2010, p. 429)

This means that what can be used as private or intimate information is

now becoming a public measure that is exploited to brand and evaluate
the overall social value of a person or organization, both by the users and
by those people who make use of these data.
What is difficult to monitor is the extent to which users are conscious
that they are not totally responsible for their identity construction, repu-
tation building and self-branding. Social media platforms have their own
‘logic’ (van Dijck & Poell, 2013)—that is to say their norms, strategies,
technologies and economies which support its dynamics—and this logic
is not clearly identifiable since there are crucial connections which link
together these platforms with users, institutions, economies and tech-
nologies: social media are used by individuals, driven by technologies,
scaffolded by economic patterns and embedded in institutional bodies
(government agencies, news, corporate, education, etc.). Although social
media are able to move their logic beyond their platforms, yet their spe-
cific technological, discursive, economic and organizational tactics strive
to be implicit or appear ‘natural’.
As van Dijck and Poell claim, there are four technical mechanisms
which underpin social networks and which will be analyzed in this study
(Sect. 9.4.2). These are: programmability, popularity, connectivity and
datafication. By programmability the scholars mean ‘the ability of a social
media platform to trigger and steer users’ creative or communicative con-
tributions, while users, through their interaction with […] coded environ-
ments, may in turn influence the flow of communication and information
activated by such a platform’ (2013, p. 5). The first part of this statement
looks at technology and refers to computer code, data, algorithms, proto-
cols, interfaces and the platform organizations that are entangled in pro-
gramming. According to Critical Internet Studies (Beer, 2009; boyd &
Crawford, 2012; Mager, 2012; Milioni, 2015; van Dijck, 2009, 2013),
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 263

algorithms are no longer sets of coded instructions but they are able to
steer user experiences, content and user relations through relational activi-
ties, such as liking, favoriting, recommending, sharing, endorsing and so
on, and these technological mechanisms are not visible. The second part
of the statement, instead, refers to human agency: users have crucial
agency in the process of running and directing programmability thanks
both to their own contributions, when they upload contents, and to the
possibility, when known, to refuse coded instructions or protocols, for
instance by maneuvering the privacy settings button in LinkedIn. Content
is no longer programmed just by a central agency, though this still has
remarkable control, and users can manipulate coded interactions. This
happens, for example, when users heavily retweet posts on Twitter, creat-
ing in this way a ‘trend’ topic, or click on the Like button to establish
affiliation (Zappavigna, 2012), and these actions are unpredictable.
Popularity makes use of the same mechanisms as programmability. It
depends on both algorithmic and socioeconomic components. Each plat-
form has its distinct algorithm for boosting the popularity of people,
things or ideas, which is mostly quantitative rather than qualitative. The
Like button aims to brand a social experience or event but the underlying
technology immediately adds it to an automated ‘like-economy’. The
logic of online popularity resides in links for ‘Most viewed’ profile on
LinkedIn, friend stats on Facebook, or follower counts on Twitter.
‘Platform metrics are increasingly accepted as legitimate standards to
measure and rank people and ideas; these rankings are then amplified
through mass media and in turn reinforced by users through social but-
tons such as following and liking’ (van Dijck & Poell, 2013, p. 7).
Connectivity differs slightly from connectedness since it conflates both
the meaning of participation (connectedness) and the technological
valence. Connectivity, which belongs to the semantic field of ‘hardware’,
implies the socio-technical affordance of networked platforms to connect
content to user activities (agency). Connectivity, on the one hand, allows
users to exert influence over the content uploaded by both creating strate-
gic alliances or communities and shaping target audiences through tactics
of automated group formation or personalized recommendations (e.g.
‘People you may know’ on LinkedIn). On the other, connectivity always
mediates users’ agency and establishes how to construct connections.3
264 S. Petroni

Datafication stands for ‘the ability of networked platforms to render

into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified
before: not just demographic or profiling data yielded by customers in
(online) surveys, but automatically derived metadata from smart phones
such as time stamps and GPS-inferred locations’ (ibid., p. 9). When con-
tents such as music, books, videos and even relationships (friends, likes,
trends and endorsements) are mediated by social media platforms, they
become data. All three principles so far illustrated—programmability,
popularity and connectivity—are interwoven in datafication. Mainstream
thinking conceives of data as raw resources simply being transported
through online channels. Yet, datafication is a crucial facet in social media
logic since it adds a real-time data dimension to social media’s notion of
liveness. The fact that the platform can detect instantaneous activities of
user behavior, that it can translate them into data and process them,
translate again the data into valuable information about individuals,
groups or society in real time, reflects much of social media data’s value.
Datafication processes remain invisible, and this poses questions about
the real link between data and users and about how monitoring and steer-
ing can be manipulated. The overall logic of social media affects social
agency and the shaping of social relations accordingly.
A claim from Kampf et al. (2014, p. 3) says that when professionals
build a personal profile in LinkedIn, they are ‘actively engaging in build-
ing their professional ethos, or credibility, especially in the summary sec-
tion’. This assertion has triggered the analysis of this chapter. In fact, the
aim of this study is to verify whether de facto the summary section in
LinkedIn, thanks only to the concise verbal resources utilized, builds
reputation and credibility or whether the reputation building process
relies instead on the overall platform architecture and in particular on its
digital interactive affordances. In order to verify this problem statement,
two research questions have been posed:

(RQ1) How can online self-presentations be commodified and mar-

ketized as brands in terms of promotional discursive strategies?
(RQ2) To what extent can these marketized self-profiles be constructed
exclusively through verbal resources, or instead, be generated by inter-
active affordances and functionalities embedded in social network
technology?
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 265

9.3 D
 ata and Procedure
For this study, an empirical research has been conducted on a sample of
LinkedIn profiles. More precisely, the sample is composed of 80 profiles,
40 women and 40 men, equally distributed into 4 professional catego-
ries—journalists, photographers, web managers and project managers—
all of them holding a higher education degree. In this phase (RQ1), only
their summary sections have been extracted from their profiles and pro-
cessed using a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text
analysis, Antconc. The procedure adopted follows the corpus linguistic
approach (Biber, 2007; Biber & Conrad, 2009; Sinclair, 1991; Tognini-
Bonelli, 2001) which enables researchers to detect, for example, the per-
centage of word frequency in a corpus of texts. The quantitative analysis
has addressed those markers which can mirror impression management,
traits of narcissism and self-esteem and contribute to the reputation-
building process. These markers have been codified and then divided into
the three grammar classes suitable for marketizing one’s reputation,
namely, nouns, adjectives and verbs, and within each category only the
first top ten occurrences have been taken into consideration.4 Within
these three categories, those items which convey referential and denota-
tive meaning (e.g. project, business and professional) have been consid-
ered nonnarcissistic and markers of implicit self-esteem, while those with
a promotional meaning (e.g. skills, strategic and excellent) have been
considered narcissistic and markers of explicit self-esteem.
The second phase (RQ2) aims at identifying the most relevant interac-
tive affordances embedded in the social network technologies, namely,
programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication (cf. par. 2.3).
These affordances reside in other sections on the LinkedIn platform and,
in our opinion, the most strategic are: Skills and Recommendations,
Question and Answer, People You May Know and Who’s Viewed Your
Profile. In contrast with the first phase, here the analysis will not be lan-
guage oriented but rather process oriented. Said differently, the focus will
be on the meaning potential of these allegedly technical affordances which
can be envisaged as playing a crucial role in promoting and branding
identities. A more critical approach which takes inspiration from Social
Construction of Technology Theory (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987;
266 S. Petroni

Bijker & Law, 1992; Pinch & Bijker, 1997) and Critical Internet Studies
(Beer, 2009; boyd & Crawford, 2012; Mager, 2012; Milioni, 2015; van
Dijck, 2009, 2013) will be adopted to answer the second RQ.

9.4 Results and Discussion

9.4.1 R
 Q1 How Can Online Self-Presentations
Be Commodified and Marketized as Brands
in Terms of Promotional Discursive Strategies?

After extracting data from the summary sections of the sample, Antconc
software has processed them, and the first results are displayed in the follow-
ing figures. Figure 9.1 shows the percentage related to the most frequent
nouns utilized in the sample. The first top-ten nouns are project, business,
experience, strategy, skills, communication, product, leadership, success
and solution, all belonging to the business and communication domain.
For its part, Fig. 9.2 shows the percentage of occurrence of the most
frequent verbs, namely, be, have, work, help, write, build, report, plan,
develop and consult. It is important to underline that ‘be’ and ‘have’ have
been evaluated only when used as stative verbs and not as auxiliaries.

Fig. 9.1 The top-ten nouns

 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 267

Fig. 9.2 The top-ten verbs

Fig. 9.3 The top-ten adjectives

In Fig. 9.3, the top-ten adjectives are shown: professional, exceptional,

strategic, creative, innovative, excellent, responsible, effective, expert and
dynamic.
As for nouns, regardless of the professional peculiarities, the analysis
demonstrates that in all four professional categories words such as ‘proj-
ect’ and ‘business’ are the most frequent but at same time the most gen-
eral in meaning. They can be in fact classified as ‘semi-technical terms’
since they represent the ‘general vocabulary that has a higher frequency in
a specific field’ (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p. 83). They need hence
268 S. Petroni

to be collocated and contextualized to convey meaning which expresses

reputation building.
Words such as ‘skills’, ‘leadership’ and ‘success’ which can be more
immediately matched with the semantic fields of reputation and credibil-
ity have, instead, a lower frequency. These results suggest that profession-
als do not seem to brand themselves by using more strategic words which
would more clearly manage their ‘identity announcement’, express their
narcissistic traits (intelligence, uniqueness, power) or build their explicit
self-esteem by using promotional markers. Verb category shows that,
even though eight out of ten verbs are dynamic, the two stative verbs, ‘be’
and ‘have’, prevail over the others in terms of occurrences. While the
dynamic verbs denote the profession such as write, plan, build, develop
and so on, the stative verbs express state of being and conditions.
‘Have’ mainly collocates with nouns (knowledge, skills, experience,
etc.), and ‘be’ is followed by the user’s profession (I’m a photographer,
I’m a journalist, etc.), but without transforming the identity into a
brand. As for the adjectives, self-branding seems to work more effec-
tively: ‘exceptional’, ‘strategic’, ‘excellent’, ‘innovative’ and so on reflect
identity announcement, narcissistic traits and explicit self-esteem, and in
this way impression management and reputation building are more
clearly constructed.
However, the most frequent term is ‘professional’, which is the most
general and neutral adjective. These results5 mirror what has already
emerged in other studies. For example, van Dijck claimed that ‘LinkedIn’s
profiles look clean and factual, with only one formal picture as eye-catcher
and text arranged mostly in the form of lists’ (2013, p. 208). In this
analysis the focus is only on the summary section simply because this is
the unique space where professionals can describe themselves through the
elaboration of a very concise resume, as the platform itself recommends.
Nevertheless, there are other sections such as Education, Experience,
Skills, Interests, Additional Info, Volunteer Experiences, Honors and
Awards, Publications, Projects and so on that combined with the sum-
mary section constitute the digital CV. But these spaces are predefined by
the platform and require only brief and factual information. Self-branding
verbal potential resides then in the summary section where results have
shown a scarce use of self-branding techniques. ‘Online presentations
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 269

resemble formatted CVs containing only the most relevant facts on edu-
cation, current and past positions, as well as former experience’ (ibid.).
Paradoxically, from a linguistic point of view, the platform seems to ‘dis-
suade’ users from inserting valuable forms of self-expression only for
brevity and clarity’s sake.
What are then the resources exploited in order to brand and marketize
professional profiles? In LinkedIn, the interface or rather the narrative6 of
the layout and the connectivity potential are the real resources which
prompt and trigger the slow transformation of LinkedIn profiles into
commodified and branded identities. The analysis, thus, runs the risk of
being incomplete if we do not investigate, at the same time, how this
platform really works, by looking not only at the language used but also
at the allegedly technical resources and affordances (RQ2).

9.4.2 R
 Q2 to What Extent Can These Marketized
Self-Profiles Be Constructed Exclusively
Through Verbal Resources, or Instead,
Be Generated by Interactive Affordances
and Functionalities Embedded in Social
Network Technology?

LinkedIn’s interface features mirror the architectural principles of pro-

grammability, popularity, connectivity and datafication to redirect users’
self-expressions. Thanks to these affordances, the platform maneuvers
and merges users’ needs for self-communication and self-branding with
those for LinkedIn’s datafication. Thus, most profiles are designed on a
‘programmed’ self of one’s professional identity and not on his/her life
story and career. Despite its obvious preference for a clear-cut presenta-
tion of the professional self, LinkedIn exploits the same strategies and
techniques of social media logic. In fact, profiles on LinkedIn are more
than CVs uploaded with the aim to be recruited. It is possible to claim
without being overstated that LinkedIn profiles function as ‘inscriptions
of normative professional behavior’ (van Dijck, 2013, p. 208). Each pro-
file mirrors a well-defined template of one’s professional identity, and this
is thanks to the programmed format following the strategic narrative
which is shown to peers and anonymous evaluators.
270 S. Petroni

There are some LinkedIn sections7 in particular that contribute to the

creation of this narrative professional profile and that fully exploit the four
principles (descriptors) of social media logic. These sections are: Skills and
Recommendations, Question and Answer, People You May Know and
Who’s Viewed Your Profile. Skills and Recommendations is the most rel-
evant space where professionals can merge their ‘identity announcement’
(Skills) with their ‘identity placement’ (Recommendations). LinkedIn
does not require users’ life story but induces them to highlight specific
skills in order to brand their strength (see the Profile Strength at the right-
top side of the personal homepage). Members are also triggered to add at
least two recommendations which can display members’ relations with
authoritative people who advocate their knowledge and skills (popularity
and connectivity). If users do not complete this feature, it will be as if
nobody was willing to endorse them and the Profile Strength area will
signal this gap. Vice versa, the Profile Strength will be at its best when all
sections are compiled and the number of contacts (groups, people who
recommend and validate skills) increases.
As for the Question and Answer space, members’ professional identity
may be boosted by contributing to this area if they answer questions posed
by people in their professional field. Thus, this becomes part of users’ pro-
file, unless they opt out of this feature, but to do this a conscious change
of privacy settings is necessary (connectivity and programmability).
The third LinkedIn section, People You May Know (PYMK), perfectly
reflects the principles of connectivity and popularity, through a tab
prominently featured on each personal page. In fact, LinkedIn manipu-
lates this feature to automatically connect users to all possible ties, that is,
contacts of contacts, and these can be people you may desire to know or
need to know. The PYMK algorithm automatically recommends social
relations on the basis of inferred data in order also to recruit new mem-
bers for its services: LinkedIn continuously sends out invitations to non-
members, pushing them to sign up for the service and connect with the
people already part of ‘your extended network’.
Professional reputation is built on the base of Who’s Viewed Your
Profile space where users are allowed to measure their own professional
value, their ‘identity placement’, by looking at their profile stats, indi-
cating the names, titles and companies of people who look at the user’s
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 271

profile. This area shows the ‘state of one’s professional brand’ and
hence users can understand how impressive they are by analyzing the
popularity of their profile. Datafication here is clearly represented and
made visible through profile stats which are aimed at increasing users’
personal scores. Ongoing performances of data keep users’ profiles
always updated demonstrating that they are well connected, sociable
and skilled.
In conclusion, the evidence of self-branding in LinkedIn profiles
mainly emerges not from the information provided in the summary sec-
tion, the unique area where users can describe their life verbally as in a
CV, but from the information users select or add in the other sections
and above all from the application of the four principles. As stated above,
at this level, what provides evidence of the self-branding process is not a
question of quantitative data, for example, the skills selected, the num-
ber of connections for each professional profile, which are, of course,
strategic elements for impression management. The analysis, in fact, is
not data driven but rather process driven. Therefore, what needs to be
highlighted is the presence of these algorithmic principles and how they
process users’ data in order to transform impression management into
self-branding. These principles endorse virtually, though practically,
every strategy of the professional network, including people who are
already members of LinkedIn but also those who can be potentially
recruited for the service.

9.5 Concluding Remarks

The two levels of conscious and unconscious self-performance, respec-
tively self-expression and self-promotion, are today newly relevant when
applied to online platforms, and to LinkedIn in particular. Users con-
struct their own profile purposely, and in doing so they provide purpose-
oriented information. In this study, the focus has been on how
professionals build their profiles and hence their reputation and brand.
The two RQs posed aim at identifying the resources through which users
carry out this process. Writing a sort of brief resume and compiling the
rest of the digital CV by incorporating brief and factual information, on
272 S. Petroni

the one hand, and making use of the interactive affordances embedded in
the platform, on the other, are the resources taken into consideration.
Data collection and analysis draw attention only to the summary section
as it is the part written exclusively by the profile’s owner. Thus, threads,
forums, recommendations, endorsements, Q&A section, trending story-
line and so on, which are narratives composed by the owner together
with other users or directly by the other connected users, have not been
included in the analysis of verbal texts.
The first part of the analysis has investigated how four categories of
professionals, journalists, photographers, Web managers and project
managers, exploit verbal resources to brand themselves. Results have
demonstrated that they do not use those markers that have been consid-
ered as self-branding descriptors which most clearly highlight impression
management, self-esteem and narcissistic traits. In fact, as regards impres-
sion management, findings suggest that ‘identity announcement’ is pro-
cessed softly and does not seem to trigger promoting and branding. As far
as the self-esteem trait is concerned, these profiles move along a contin-
uum between implicit and explicit self-esteem where the implicit seems
to be more relevant than the explicit. This claim is also supported by the
factual top-ten nouns and the agentive value conveyed through the exten-
sive use of the stative verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’.
It is interesting to emphasize that what affects the ‘profile strength’ is
not what the users write but only if this section is actually compiled.
What increases the value of the measurement system is the number of
sections of the platform the professional fills in and the number of con-
nections established, along with the number of recommendations posted
by users’ connections and matched with each single skill.
The answer to the second RQ, in fact, is in the analysis of the digital
technical resources of LinkedIn which are not just simple technical
devices but, rather, they channel meaning potential. The way the plat-
form triggers connecting and networking procedures by pushing users to
establish connections with a wider audience so that their profile strength
grows represents the core of the self-branding process. The descriptors
used for RQ2, programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafica-
tion, show how the platform itself shapes professionals’ profiles.
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 273

These technological potentialities, therefore, make the conventional

discourse analysis approach, even when it is critical, ineffective in some
ways since the evidence and findings which can emerge from this analysis
do not mirror the real meaning-making processes generated within and by
the platform. As seen in the case study of LinkedIn profiles, the summary
and the digital CVs’ sections resemble the printed resume and CV text
types in the attempt to fulfill their function. There are no noteworthy
changes in terms of rhetorical strategies and persuasive discourse markers
deriving from the digital environment, or rather these strategies are para-
doxically less exploited. The effective and strategic rhetoric of LinkedIn
profiles no longer resides in the data uploaded by users but also in how the
algorithms which fuel the platforms manipulate these data.
Unfortunately, users are not aware of creating behavioral data that are in
turn gathered and gauged by social media owners along with their clients.
Users are thus profiled by social media platforms and this profiling affects
them in the processes of data creation and identity construction. Data
deriving from personal behavior, attitude, values expressed and so on, once
a simple product of a mere online sociality, have now become a kind of
‘social asset’ to exploit (Mager, 2012; Milioni, 2015; van Dijck, 2013).
Thus, it is possible to conclude that practices of self-profiling, self-
presenting and self-branding are only partially carried out by users them-
selves since the platforms’ technologies are aimed at the construction of
identities which are shaped by an underlying algorithmic ideology.

Notes
1. Traditionally, remediation (McLuhan, 1964) means a shift from an old
medium, an old technology (e.g. writing), to a newer one (e.g. printing).
Bolter and Grusin (1999) claim that today new visual media carry out
their cultural significance precisely by borrowing from, by paying homage
to, rivaling, and refashioning earlier media: photography remediates
painting, film remediates stage production and photography, and televi-
sion remediates film, vaudeville and radio. A website, a portal or a social
network, thanks to their technological affordances, remediate television,
radio, TV, news, journals, letters (email) and face-to-face conversation
(chat) simultaneously.
274 S. Petroni

2. https://www.omnicoreagency.com/linkedin-statistics/
3. The human connectedness efficacy of social media recalls early network
sociology. Network sociologists (Rainie & Wellman, 2012) claim that
new media technologies have given rise to ‘networked individualism’ due
to the shift in sociality from massively linked groups to loosely bounded
social networks of relations. From this viewpoint, social networks lead
users to build their own customized social networks and communities.
Consequently, connectivity can be tackled as a breakthrough affordance
for connecting users to content, users to users, platforms to users, users to
advertisers and platforms to platforms algorithmically, and blurs the
boundaries between private and public and between commerce and state.
4. This procedure takes inspiration from diverse studies carried out on CVs,
resumes and motivational letters (Basthomi, 2012; Bhatia, 1993; DeKay,
2006). However, it is important to underline that most literature concern-
ing these topics is mainly based on both a prescriptive approach (Enelow
& Kursmark, 2012; Johnson, 2016) and the Genre Analysis framework
(Bhatia, 1996; Furka, 2008; Swales, 1990).
5. Some gender correlations have been created in order to focus on the use
of these markers from another perspective. The most interesting data to
split into the two binary gender categories are those related to verbs
and adjectives, since men and women tend to use the same nouns to
express their identities and hence the results would resemble those
shown in Fig. 9.1. If we look at the adjective category, women mainly
make use of adjectives such as professional, responsible and effective,
focusing more on reliability rather than on narcissism and explicit self-
esteem, whereas men describe their qualities and/or activities mostly as
strategic, creative and excellent. As for verbs, men tend to use ‘have’
more than ‘be’, whereas women seem to be eager to state their agentive
value. With ‘have’ being a stative verb in these contexts, its meaning
implies possession, and this result combined with the adjectives used
demonstrates that men are more prone to brand themselves through
identity announcement, explicit self-esteem and narcissistic traits than
women. As regards the other verbs, women seem to use more dynamic
verbs than men, and, as said above, these verbs are extremely profession
oriented and objective. Of course, a more detailed gender-related inves-
tigation would need to be contextualized in the wide area of gender
studies in professional settings but this is not the rationale of this
contribution.
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 275

6. By narrative the author means the shift from a hypertextual database

structure toward a linear narrative structure which steers data input into a
more uniform format (Manovich, 2001).
7. These sections are present at the time of data collection.

References
Amoore, L. (2011). Data derivatives. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(6), 24–43.
Archambault, A., & Grudin, J. (2012). A longitudinal study of Facebook,
LinkedIn, & Twitter use. CHI, 2012, 2741–2750.
Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Basthomi, Y. (2012). Curriculum vitae: A discourse of celebration with narcis-
sistic allusions. TEFLIN Journal, 23(1), 1–24.
Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and
the technological unconscious. New Media & Society, 11(6), 985–1002.
Bhatia, V. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. New York:
Longman.
Bhatia, V. (1996). Methodological issues in genre analysis. Journal of Language
and Communication Studies, 16, 39–60.
Biber, D. (2007). Discourse on the move: Using corpus analysis to describe discourse
structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Bijker, W., Hughes, T., & Pinch, T. (1987). The social construction of technological
systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge
MA/London: MIT Press.
Bijker, W., & Law, J. (1992). General introduction. In W. Bijker & J. Law
(Eds.), Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change
(pp. 1–16). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations
for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon information.
Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679.
boyd, D. M. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances,
dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self:
276 S. Petroni

Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). London:
Routledge.
Brouer, R. L., Stefanone, M. A., Badawy, R. L., & Egnoto, M. J. (2015). Losing
control of company information in the recruitment process: The impact of
LinkedIn on organizational attraction. In Proceedings from the 4th Hawaii
International Conference on System Science (pp. 1879–1888). Hawaii, HI:
IEEE.
Brown, R. P., & Zeigler-Hill, V. (2004). Narcissism and the nonequivalence of
self-esteem measures: A matter of dominance? Journal of Research in
Personality, 38, 585–592.
Buffardi, L. E., & Campbell, W. K. (2008). Narcissism and social networking
web sites. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1303–1314.
Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., & Shelton, J. (2004). Psychological entitle-
ment: Interpersonal consequences and validation of a selfreport measure.
Journal of Personality Assessment, 83, 29–45.
Campbell, W. K., Rudich, E., & Sedikides, C. (2002). Narcissism, selfesteem,
and the positivity of self-views: Two portraits of self-love. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 358–368.
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011). A new algorithmic identity: Soft biopolitics and the
modulation of control. Theory Culture & Society, 28(6), 164–181.
Chouliaraki, L., & Morsing, M. (2009). Media, organizations and identity.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cook, G. (2012). Persuasion in English. In D. Allington & B. Mayor (Eds.),
Communicating in English: Text, talk, technology (pp. 225–266). London &
New York: Routledge.
Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2017). Language in business, language at work.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
DeKay, S. H. (2006). Expressing emotion in electronic job cover letters. Business
Communication Quarterly, 69, 435–439.
Díez Prados, M., & Cabrejas-Peñuelas, A. B. (2015). Persuasion at work: Digital
media for self-promotion. Paper presented at ADDA (Approches to Digital
Discourse Analysis), 1st International Conference, 18–20 November 2015,
Valencia.
Dudley-Evans, T., & St John, M. J. (1998). Development in English for specific
purposes: A multi-disciplinary approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ellison, N., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-
presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication, 11(2), 415–441.
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 277

Ellison, N. B., Steinfeld, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook
‘friends’: Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230.
Emmons, R. A. (1984). Factor analysis and construct validity of the narcissistic
Personality inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 291–300.
Enelow, W., & Kursmark, L. (2012). Expert resumes for managers and executives
(3rd ed.). St. Paul, MN: JIST Works.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, MA: Polity
Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman.
Featherstone, M. (2007). Consumer culture and postmodernism (2nd ed.).
London: Sage.
Fiske, S. T., & Tylor, S. E. (2013). Social cognition from brain to culture. London:
Sage publications.
Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Fogg, B. J. (2009). A behaviour model for persuasive design. Persuasive 2009.
Proceeding of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology
April 2009, Claremont, CA, USA. Retrieved from http://bjfogg.com/fbm_
files/page4_1.pdf
Furka, I. (2008). The curriculum vitae and the motivational letter: A rhetorical
and cultural analysis. WoPaLP, 2, 18–37.
Gabriel, M. T., Critelli, J. W., & Ee, J. S. (1994). Narcissistic illusions in self-
evaluations of intelligence and attractiveness. Journal of Personality, 62, 143–155.
Gardner, W. L., & Martinko, M. J. (1988). Impression management: An obser-
vational study linking audience characteristics with verbal presentations.
Academy of Management Journal, 31, 42–65.
Gibson, J. J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw & J. Bransford
(Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology
(pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of the self in everyday life. New York:
Anchor Books.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour. New York:
Doubleday.
Guillory, J., & Hancock, J. (2012). The effect of LinkedIn on deception in
resumes. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15(3), 135–140.
Hargittai, E. (2008). Whose space? Differences among users and non-users of
social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13,
276–297.
278 S. Petroni

Hearn, A. (2010). Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and
the digital ‘reputation’ economy. Ephemera, 10(3/4), 421–438.
Herring, S., & Kapidzic, S. (2015). Teens, gender, and self-presentation in social
media. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of social and behav-
ioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 146–152). Oxford: Elsevier.
Herring, S. C. (2013). Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, reconfigured, and emer-
gent. In D. Tannen & A. M. Trester (Eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and new
media (pp. 1–25). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Hoffmann, C. R. (2012). Cohesive profiling: Meaning and interaction in personal
weblogs. Amsterdam: John Benjamins publishing.
Isaksson, M., & Jørgensen, P. E. F. (2010). Communicating corporate ethos on the
web: The self-presentation of PR agencies. Journal of Business Communication,
47(2), 119–140.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide.
New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, R. (2010). The 21st century interaction order. In M. Hviid Jacobsen
(Ed.), The contemporary Goffman (pp. 257–274). London: Routledge.
Jenkins, R. (2014). Social identity. London: Routledge.
John, O. P., & Robins, R. W. (1994). Accuracy and bias in self-perception:
Individual differences in self-enhancement and the role of narcissism. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 206–219.
Johnson, N. L. (2016). Improving the accounting student resume language:
Accounting faculty best practice tools. The Accounting Educators’ Journal, 26,
18–33.
Joos, G. J. (2008). Social media: New frontiers in hiring and recruiting.
Employment Relations Today, 35(1), 51–59.
Kampf, C., Broillet, A., & Emad, S. (2014). What and how do we learn from
LinkedIn forums? An exploratory investigation. Retrieved from https://hesso.
tind.io/record/479/files/Emad_Linkedinforums_2014.pdf
Kaputa, C. (2005). UR a brand! How smart people brand themselves for business
success. Mountain View, CA: Davies-Black Publishing.
Kelly, B., & Delasalle, J. (2012). Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu enhance
access to open repositories? In OR2012: The 7th International Conference on
Open Repositories. Bath: University of Bath.
Krämer, C. N., & Winter, S. (2008). Impression management 2.0: The relation-
ship of self-esteem, extraversion, self-efficacy, and self-presentation within
social networking sites. Journal of Media Psychology, 20, 106–116.
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 279

Labrecque, L. I., Markos, E., & Milne, G. R. (2011). Online personal branding:
Processes, challenges, and implications. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 25,
37–50.
Lair, D. J., Sullivan, K., & Cheney, G. (2005). Marketization and the recasting
of the professional self: The rhetoric and ethics of personal branding.
Management Communication Quarterly, 18, 307–343.
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature
review and two-component model. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 34–47.
Lee, I. (2005). The evolution of e-recruiting: A content analysis of fortune 100
career web sites. Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations, 3(3), 57–68.
Mager, A. (2012). Algorithmic ideology: How capitalist society shapes search
engines. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 769–787.
Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the
social media age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. The extension of man. London &
New York: Routledge.
Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-presentation 2.0: Narcissism and self-esteem on
Facebook. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14(4), 357–364.
Milioni, D. L. (2015). Opening the ‘black box’ of user agency: A critical cultural
studies approach to Web 2.0. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/
publication/300246504_Opening_the_‘Black_Box’_of_User_Agency_A_
Critical_Cultural_Studies_Approach_to_Web_20
Miller, J. D., & Campbell, W. K. (2008). Comparing clinical and social-personal-
ity conceptualizations of narcissism. Journal of Personality, 76, 449–476.
Nishar, D. (2014). The next three billion [INFOGRAPHIC]. Retrieved from
LinkedIn Corporation: http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/04/18/the-next-
three-billion/
Orduna-Malea, E., Font, C. I., & Ontalba-Ruipérez, J. A. (2017). From univer-
sty to private company: A measureable route of LinkedIn users. In M. Cabrera
& N. Lloret (Eds.), Digital tools for academic brending and self-promotion
(pp. 127–150). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter:
The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 181–201.
Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2011). A networked self: Identity, community, and culture
on social network sites. London: Routledge.
280 S. Petroni

Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism,
machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36,
556–568.
Peters, T. (1997). The brand called you. Retrieved from https://www.fastcom-
pany.com/28905/brand-called-you
Petroni, S. (2011). Language in the multimodal web domain. Rome/Ottawa:
Aracne/Legas.
Petroni, S. (2016). Digitality and persuasive technologies: New social actions and
practices in digital settings. In S. Gardner & S. Alsop (Eds.), Systemic functional
linguistics in the digital age (pp. 29–44). United Kingdom: Equinox Publishing.
Pinch, J., & Bijker, W. (1997). The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or
how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit
each other. In W. Bijker, T. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction
of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology
(pp. 17–50). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rein, I. J., Kotler, P., & Shields, B. (2006). The elusive sports fan, reinventing
sports in a crowded marketplace. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Rodden, J. (2006). Reputation and its vicissitudes. Society, 43(3), 75–80.
Rosenberg, M. (1986). Conceiving the self. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger
Publishing Company.
Schawbel, D. (2013). Reasons why your online presence will replace your
resume in 10 years. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/
danschawbel/2011/02/21/5-reasons-why-youronline-presence-will-replace-
your-resume-in-10-years/
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Singh, P. R. (2011). Consumer culture and postmodernism. Postmodern
Openings, Year 2, 5(5), 55–88.
Sordello, S. (2014). LinkedIn’s Q1 2014 earnings. Retrieved from LinkedIn
Corporation: http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/05/01/linkedins-q1-2014-earn-
ings/
Stutzman, F., & Hartzog, W. (2012). Boundary regulation in social media. In
Proceedings from the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative
Work (pp. 769–778).
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research setting.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses… 281

Thurlow, C., & Mroczek, K. (Eds.). (2011). Digital discourse: Language in the
new media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Tomlinson, E. (2016). First encounters in professional cyberspace: Writer’s
exploration of LinkedIn. In P. Thomas & P. Takayoshi (Eds.), Literacy in
practice: Writing in private, public, and working lives (pp. 163–176). London
and New York: Routledge.
van Dijck, J. (2009). Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated con-
tent. Media, Culture & Society, 31(1), 41–58.
van Dijck, J. (2013). ‘You have one identity’: Performing the self on Facebook
and LinkedIn. Media, Culture & Society, 35(2), 199–215.
van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding social media logic. Media and
Communication, 1(1), 2–14.
Vazire, S., & Gosling, S. D. (2004). E-perceptions: Personality impressions
based on personal websites. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87,
123–132.
Ward, C., & Yates, D. (2013). Personal branding and e-professionalism. Journal
of Service Science, 6(1), 101–104.
Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic
expression. London and Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and social media: How we use lan-
guage to create affiliation on the web. London: Continuum.
Zhao, S., Grasmuck, S., & Martin, J. (2008). Identity construction on Facebook:
Digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human
Behavior, 24, 1816–1836.