Week 9 Tutorial

The tutorial task this week was to look at the essay topics and to discuss the ideas about it.

I was looking at the topics, and this one appears to be the most appealing to me:

How do social media change our understanding of individual identity, with regard to the kinds of people we have in our social networks?

Well, this is just kind of a brainstorm:

• On social networks people can represent themselves in any way they like, to an extent by the pictures they post, the links they like, etc.
• People represent themselves even through small things like punctuation. You are usually seen as illiterate or 'cool'. 'Howes yu dai?' or simple 'how r u?' is different from 'How are you?'
  
• People may have different accounts that certain friends don't have to represent themselves in different ways. Like on Facebook, someone biography may be completely different to the biography they display on a dating website. And they can get away with it, because unlike Facebook or Myspace, their close friends who know them really well cannot tell that they are faking their identity.
• Does this create a type of schizophrenia or paranoia? And is it difficult to keep up with the different personalities?
• Does this relate to sociology and it's concepts to being able to adapt to certain environments?
• Do people refrain from saying certain things on their social networks in fear of offending people?
  
• People do have different groups of people on their networks. For example they may have religious friends or party friends or ethnic friends and therefore restrains them from expressing their personal and actual opinion.
  

Clearly this needs to be researched and built on but this is my brainstorm. :) Good start I think, now to execute the essay...