Identity and subjectivity in virtual social networks: the Facebook case
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Abstract
Virtual spaces, created to establish and strengthen social networking have become very popular throughout the world in the last 5 years. Spaces such as Facebook or Myspace transcend language barriers, and go beyond frontiers, thus allowing users to interact with a larger amount of people in spite of distance, or cultural differences, getting close to what Marshall McLuhan defined as the electronic age (1964).
Virtual social networks allow users to create their own profiles, based on how do they want to be known as by other users. This a process of re-creation of the self, that shows in what way users identify themselves as subjects, and to re-configurate such image, in order to promote a, perhaps, idealized version of themselves. This work pretends to approach this phenomenon as a process of communication in which users become both communicators and messages of themselves.
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