Blog#6 looking back at my post #1 ...

Thinking back about what I said in my first post, I think my use of social media has not changed so much. I still use the same social I mentioned in my first post: Facebook, mixi, Gmail, and carrier-provided email. In addition to them, I started to use Twitter. Even though I had a twitter account before this class, I did not use it at all. But I started to engage in tweeting because of this class. Twitter is the only change in the types of social media I use. What social media I use and how I use them have not changed, but I would say, how I feel when I am using them and how I look at other people’s ways of using social media have slightly changed.

It is because I became more conscious of my “identity” on social media and my “audience”. Throughout the semester, there were a lot of  moments when I thought about what makes users’ identities and who the audience is on social media.. When people use a SNS, most of them use it to share information with their friends. When they share information that is directed to their friends(for example, when they post something private that only their friends might care about and when they make the profile pictures showing their silly faces that their friends might think are funny), they regard their friends as their audience. But at the same time, some of them put information on social media very much caring about the “public” audience. When it comes to certain kind of information, their concept of ‘audience’ gets beyond the networked “friends” and becomes the “public”. When I use social media and share some information there I am now more aware of who I regard as my audience.

And I realized who I regard as my audience is much related to my multiple identities on different social media. On mixi, I share my diaries that include a message to my Japanese friends or might be interesting to them. I do not share pictures that expose my appearance to others as much as those in my facebook albums. On facebook, I less care about showing others how I look because they also show how they look and they also do not really care about the fact that they are publicly exposing their physical appearances. And on facebook, I also tend to share more information about my daily life regularly. Social cues that can construct my identity, on mixi and on facebook, might be different because I choose what information about myself should be open depending on the different audience. Even on facebook solely, I would say, I have two identities because I segregate myself by two languages. I have more English speaking friends in my friends list, so I tend to post something more general, less personally information in English; however, what I say in my status in Japanese sound more stupid or closer to who I think I am that the things I mutter in English.

I remember, Mark Zuckberg once said that on facebook, we will have a “single identity”; “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly” (http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/13/zuckerberg-privacy/). He might mean that because people are getting more comfortable about disclosing their personal information and their selves are also disclosed by their friends, they end up having one single authentic identity on facebook. Considering my identity and its relation to the audience throughout this semester, I disagree with Zuckberg. Although it seems that I have multiple identities on different social media, all of them are one part of who I really am; it is not that one single identity expressed on one particular social media is my "true" identity, but it is just one dimension of my authentic self. There are just different facets of my authentic identity that I express depending on who I think is my audience.

Finally, I said in my first post that I am not sure if I want to keep using Facebook. Now I think I will continue to use it for a little longer than I expected before. People talk about disadvantages of social media (how it is addictive, how it changes friendship etc). At the time I created my first post , those negative sides of social media were standing out for me. But now after thinking about facebook and how social media exists in our life, I feel less harmful about facebook, rather, I feel it is supporting my real life.

 

Sachi (I made this post first by mistake in my OWN space:p....http://st1356.posterous.com/blog6-response-to-my-post-1)