A performance and practice-based view of social media identity and its implications for higher education.

1. Social Media Identities:
Practices, Performativity, & Platforms
Bonnie Stewart
University of Prince Edward Island
bstewart@upei.ca

2. Who are we when we're online?

3. http://www.onlineschools.org/blog/facebook-obsession/

4. How are online identities interwoven
with our offline lives?

5. Performativity
The self can only ever be
known in process & in
relation to the other.
Norms govern the social
intelligibility of action.
The self IS the various acts
and practices which
constitute performance.
The inner self – identity – is
an effect.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/susan402/4067807003

6. Practices
“I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but
subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and
interacting with the world.” - M. Wesch, 2009

7. Social media practices ARE
identity practices.
They perform versions of self within
networked, participatory, reputational
spaces.

8. Social Media Platforms
Identity is non-anonymous,
recognizable, and
sustained over time.
Pseudonymity increasingly
challenged by platforms
and monetization.
Downswing in forced
reciprocality (friending),
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daniloramosweb/3854330282/ increased asymmetry
and control of affiliation
groupings.

9. Participatory
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hendrikspeck/3887169238/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barmony/6224153051

10. Augmented Reality

11. Produsage:
a networked economy in which
creation and consumption are
combined.

12. Identity in a Celebrity Economy
http://www.slideshare.net/ConstantContact/10-quick-facts-you-should-know-about-consumer-behavior-on-twitter?from=ss_embed

13. Deleuze's society of control?
Identity in social media is
distributed, branded, and
accustomed to
heterarchical participation
in an environment rife
with hierarchical metrics.

14. Social Media Traditional Education
Self-directed Institutionally-directed
Focused on filtering Focused on finding
knowledge knowledge
Audience = World Audience = Teacher
Crowdsourcing Plagiarism
Branding Commodification
Learner = networked Learner = discrete, rational
identity individual
Always accessible Bounded by time & space

15. Implications for Higher Education
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/3998273279/sizes/z/in/photostream/
?

16. Thank you.
@bonstewart