LESSON 5: WHO AM I IN

CYBERWORLD?
DIGITAL SELF
These days, more people are becoming active in using the
internet for research, pleasure, business, communication,
and other purposes. Indeed, the internet is of great help
for everyone. On the other hand, people assume different
identities while in the cyberspace. People act differently
when they are online and offline. We have our real
identity and online identity.
Abstraction
The number of people who are becoming more active online continues to
increase worldwide. More than half of the population worldwide now uses
the internet. It has only been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the
World Wide Web available to the public, but in that time, the internet has
already become an integral part of everyday life for most of the world’s
population. The Philippines is among one of the countries with the most
active Internet users(We are social and Hootsuite.).
-Almost two-thirds of the world’s population has a mobile phone.
-More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now
‘broadband’
-More than one in five of the world’s population shopped online in the
past 30 days.

Media users in the Philippines grew by 12million or 25% while the

number of mobile social users increased by 13 million or 32%.Those
growth figures are still higher compared to the previous years. More
than half of the world now uses a smartphone.
Selective self – presentation Management
According to Goffman(1959) and Leary (1995), self-presentation is the
“process of controlling howone is perceived by other people” and is the
key to relationship inception and development. To construct positive
images, individuals selectively provide information about them and
carefully cater his information in response to others feedback.

Self-presentation behavior is any behavior intended to create, modify, or

maintain an impression of ourselves in the minds of others. Whenever
we are attempting to lead people to think of us in a particular way, we
are engaging in self-presentation.
Why do people engage in self presentation?
Self-presentation;
• Helps facilitate social interaction;

• Enables individuals to attain material and social

rewards; and

• Helps people privately construct desired identities

Impression Management
– is the attempt to control or influence any other people’s perceptions.
This could be their perception of a certain person (including you), a
material possession, or an event. There are two main motives of
attempting to manage the impression of others:

Instrumental
– this motive is to basically gain rewards and increase one’s self
-esteem.
Expressive
– this motivation is about attempting to be in control of one’s personal
behavior or identity. It is a response to moral norms, expectations, or
restrictions, seeking to show others that he or she, as a person, is
different.
 Impression-Management Strategies

Self-promotion
– proactive process in which a person actively says things or takes action toshow his
or her competence to an audience (Rosenfeld et al., 1995).
Ingratiation
–the process by which someone tries to win the approval or acceptance of another.
For example, if a woman wants to get her mother-in-law to like her, she may “kiss
up” to her by giving her compliments or gifts. She may also try to make herself
appear more similar to her mother-in-law in behavior and opinion.
Exemplification
– involves a strategic self-sacrifice so that observers may recognize the
dedication.
An exemplifier often wants other people to know how hard he/she has been
working because of the need to advertise his/her behavior.

Intimidation
- involves showing off authority, power, or the potential to punish in order to be
seen by observers as someone who could be or is dangerous. It can increase the
credibility of one’s threats and in turn enhances the probability that the target will
comply with the demands for agreement.

Supplication
– an approach where the individual exploits his/her weaknesses or short comings
to receive help or benefits.
Performing Gender Online
Theorist Judith Butler (1990) conceptualized gender as a
performance. She explained that popular understandings of gender and
sexuality came to be through discourse and social processes. She argued
that gender was performative, in that it is produced through millions of
individual actions, rather than something that comes naturally to
men and women.

Performances that adhere to normative understandings o gender and

sexuality are allowed, while those that do not are admonished (for example,
a boy "throwing like a girl") (Lorber 1994). In the 1990s. many Internet
scholars drew from Butler and other queer theorists to understand online
identity.
According to the disembodiment hypothesis, Internet users are free
to actively choose which gender or sexuality they are going
to portray with the possibility of creating alternate
identities (Wynn and Katz 1997). The ability of users to
self-consciously adapt and play with different gender identities
would reveal the choices involved in the production of gender,
breaking down binaries and encouraging fluidity in sexuality and
gender expression.
One explanation for these differences is that user-generated content is
often clustered by gender. Researchers have consistently shown that
similar numbers of men and women maintain a blog-about 14% of
Internet users (Lenhart et al. 2010). While the number of male and
female bloggers is roughly equivalent, they tend to blog about different
things. Overwhelmingly, certain types of blogs are written and read by
women(e.g., food, fashion, parenting), while others (e.g., technology,
politics) are written and run by men (Chittenden 2010; Hindman 2009;
Meraz 2008). Although the technologies are the same, the norms and
mores of the people using them differ.
Setting Bounderies to your Online Self

As technology continues to rapidly advance, individuals

and society are profoundly changed. So too are the tools
used to measure this universe and, therefore, our
understanding of reality improves. Boundaries of Self
and Reality Online examines the idea that technological
advances associated with the Internet are moving us in
multiple domains toward various "edges." These edges
range from self, to society, to relationships, and even to
the very nature of reality. Boundaries are dissolving and
we are redefining the elements of identity.
THANK
YOU!!!