Social media and identity construction and performance online

Technology is now widely acknowledged to have developed into an integrated part of peoples’ everyday lives. Conversely, the ways in which our online lives and behaviors are “situated in our offline lived experiences” have become increasingly recognized (Tagg and Seargeant 2017: 213). In spite of this, it still remains considerably more likely for people to form online connections with people with whom they retain some type of offline relationships, typically using “social network sites in great part as a means of documenting and organizing events and activities in their ‘offline’ lives” (Tagg and Seargeant 2017: 213). As Tagg and Seargeant (2017: 213) point out, for these reasons,

it is of particular interest to look at the extent to which an individual’s diverse ‘offline’ social roles - as parent, professional, friend and so on -are enacted or extended online, and how an awareness of one’s offline responsibilities and relationships, and the concomitant expectations of those one interacts with, shape behavior . . . [and may require people] to negotiate multiple social roles.

These observations also have obvious implications for how peoples’ religious identity construction and performance on and across social media platforms need to be approached and understood, tying directly into previous religion and digital culture research on the correlation between people’s “offline” and “online” religious commitments and engagements. As previous research has shown, it is considerably more common among people who lead active “offline” religious lives to also actively seek out and engage with religious content online (e.g. Larsen 2001; Dawson and Cowan 2004: 6; Noomen et al. 2011; Campbell 2012: 65). People have also been found to most commonly seek out religious content online that relates more directly to their own religious outlooks and engagements (Larsen 2001; Lovheim 2008).

Social media are to be viewed not simply as environments for social interaction but rather as environments that directly affect and shape different forms of sociality and interaction and greatly facilitate peoples’ construction of extended “networked selves” and performance of multiple social and cultural identities. Indeed, as Quinn and Papacharissi (2017: 353-54) observe, social media platforms “frequently invite acts of expression and connection for the mere sake of doing so, no matter how mundane or ordinary those acts may be. As these acts of expression and connection are

Digital media and religion in an international context 19 performed to audiences, actual and imagined, identity becomes increasingly performative.” To conceive of identity as performative in this context refers to identity/the self as “the product of a relational performance, and as coeffected by technological, social, affective and emotional dimensions, situated in a specific context, and coming into being in and with the medium itself” (Lundmark 2019: 14). While social media are typically designed on the basis of basic human social features and instincts, they also work to enhance and amplify these (van Dijck 2013a). We can just think of how concepts such as “liking,” “sharing,” and “following” have received new meanings through the proliferation of social media. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that “being online has become an identity order in itself, one which should now be discussed along traditional identity orders such as gender, ethnicity, age and so on to inform our understanding of the individual in the world of ICT” (Xinaris 2016: 67).

For these reasons, social media have also increasingly started to attract the interest of identity and sociality studies (Miller et al. 2016: 20). Generally, as Marwick (2013; cited in Walker Rettberg 2017: 438) points out, “social media allows people to strategically construct an identity in ways that are deeply rooted in contemporary ideas that the self is autonomous and constantly improving.” Moreover, as Tagg and Seargeant (2014; cited in Leppanen et al. 2017: 13) note, “identity performance cannot be discussed in isolation from the communities with which individuals align themselves and the ways in which those communities establish and maintain the relationships that comprise them” (cf. Miller et al. 2016: 20; for an overview of identity online see e.g. Page 2016). This is why, as Miller et al. (2016: 7) point out, the study of social media “is as much one of sociability as of communication.” These observations all have important implications for how we are to approach and study the forming of religious identity and community in increasingly social media-centered online environments (Bobkowski and Pearce 2011; Johns 2012).

Processes of performative identity construction in social media take place in environments that are often described as being marked by “context collapse” (Marwick and Boyd 2011). This term has been developed to capture the ways in which social media environments typically work to bring together multiple audiences, such as family members, friends, and colleagues, into a single online space (Tagg and Seargeant 2017: 211). Indeed, the ways in which social media work to merge “audiences and relational contexts into a single digital space [often] requires adjustments such as segregating relationships to specific platforms” (Quinn and Papacharissi 2017: 355). As argued by Tagg and Seargeant (2017: 212), the character of peoples’ interaction on social media is therefore most adequately understood as being primarily determined not by the technical affordances of particular platforms, but rather “by users’ complex understandings regarding the management of preexisting social roles and their relationships with other users and how this awareness shapes the waysin which site affordances are appropriated and negotiated for social purposes.” The effects of the present-day social media sphere on contemporary modes of sociability have, however, been far from unanimously positive. Rather, as social media and their associated platforms and technologies continue to proliferate and become ever more integrated into various aspects of daily life, the “issue of anonymity has reversed into a concern over lack of privacy” (Miller et al. 2016: 11). These developments have resulted in a growing importance of continuous boundary work, that is, the strategies and practices that people use and engage in to maintain particular types of boundaries between self and others (Abdel-Fadil 2019; Evolvi 2018a). As Quinn and Papacharissi (2017: 361) point out, “The boundary work executed within social media entails not only the performance of one’s identity, but also the ability to edit and redact it across multiple and converged audiences. . . . [On social media] boundary management extends beyond individual control to become a collective process” (cf. Bobkowski and Pearce 2011). An illustrative example of this is provided by Kavakcis and Kraeplin’s study (2017) of so-called “hijabista” - young Muslim fashion bloggers - who construct complex online identities that constantly need to balance between a religious and a fashionable self. Another example is provided by Lundmark’s (2019) study of women in the US context who are publicly performing atheist selves on YouTube. The study shows how these users address the stigma of being an atheist with regards to dominating US cultural ideas tying “good” citizenship to an idealized Christian identity. Her study underscores the ambiguous outcomes of performing religious identity for a minority group, where acts of “coming out” as an atheist on YouTube are characterized by being simultaneously an act of authentic self-expression -being positioned as role models or screens of projection for critique from various groups of readers - and an act of opening up space for others to express or come to terms with such experiences.

The proliferation of social media has also worked to enhance the narrative dimension of contemporary modes of identity construction and even to challenge previous theoretical perspectives on narrative identity theory (Romele 2013). As Tagg and Seargeant (2017: 214) observe:

Given the relative disembodiment afforded by sites such as Facebook, where attributes available to speakers in face-to-face contexts - tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, gender, age and accent - are much less salient, if accessible at all, social media participants engage in writing themselves into being (boyd 2001: 119) - where writing is seen as a rich semiotic system that goes beyond the purely verbal. That is, they portray themselves not through physical co-presence but through the use of a set of diverse but largely text-based and visual resources, including moving images such as animated GIFs and videos that involve audible content.