Understanding The Self

Who am I in the
Cyberworld?
(Digital self)
Introduction
These days, more people are becoming active
in using the internet for research, pleasure, business,
communication , and other purposes. Indeed, the
internet is of great help for everyone. On the other
hand, people assume different identities while in the
cyberspace. People act differently when they are
online and offline. We have our real identity and
online identity.
Abstraction
The number of people who are becoming more
active online continues to increase worldwide. More
than half of the population worldwide now uses the
internet. It has only been 25 years since Tim Berners-
Lee made the World Wide Web available to the
public, but in that time, the internet has already
become an integral part of everyday life for most of
the world’s population. The Philippines is among one
of the countries with the most active Internet users
(We are social and Hootsuite.).
 Almost two-thirds of the world’s population has a
mobile phone.
 More than half of all mobile connections around
the world are now ‘broadband’
 More than one in five of the world’s population
shopped online in the past 30 days.
• Media users in the Philippines grew by 12
million or 25% while the number of mobile
social users increased by 13 million or 32%.
Those growth figures are still higher
compared to the previous years. More than
half of the world now uses aa smartphone.
Selective self-presentation
Management
According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995),

self-presentation is the “process of controlling how
one is perceived by other people” and is the key to
relationship inception and development. To
construct positive images, individuals selectively
provide information about them and carefully cater
his information in response to others feedback.
Anything posted online should be considered
‘’public’’ no matter what our privacy settings are. Let
us say, a student wrote online about how much he
hated another student in school, and started bullying
him online. Does it matter if the student said, ‘’Well’’,
this is my personal account’’’? Even if the student
wrote it in a private account, it can become public
with a quick screen capture and shared with the
world. Personal identity is the interpersonal level if self
which differentiates the individual us unique from
others, while social identity is the level of self whereby
the individual identified by his or her group
membership.
Bolk (2013) explained that sharing
ourselves is no longer new and has
been practiced as soon as human
beings were formed. Digital devices
help us share information broadly, more
than ever before. For those who are
avid users, of Facebook, it is possible
that their social media friends are more
updated about their daily activities,
connections, and thoughts than their
immediate families.
• In addition, the family album of an earlier era has
become of an individual photo gallery in the digital age.
As Schwarz (2010) mentioned, we have entered an
extraordinary era of self-portraiture. Blogs and web pages
have been continuously used for greater self-reflection
and self-presentation. Facebook and other social media
applications are now a key part of self-presentation for
one sixth of humanity. As a result, researches and
participants become concerned with actively managing
identity and reputation and to warm against the
phenomenon of “oversharing (Labrecque, Markos, and
Milne 2011; Shepherd 2005; Suler 2002; Zimmer and
Hoffman 2011).
• According to Foucault(1998), Confession, along
with contemplation, self-examination, learning,
reading, and writing self-critical letters to friends, are
a part of the “technologies of the self” through
which we seek to purge and cleanse ourselves.
• Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the interest
write for an unseen audience (Serfaty 2004). Both
are number and feedback of readers provide self-
validation for the writer and a certain celebrity
(O’Regan 2009). Confessional blogs may be also
therapeutic for the audience to read, allowing
both sincere empathy and the voyeuristic appeal
of witnessing a public confession (Kitzmann 2003).
Gender and Sexuality online
According to Marwick (2013), while the term

“sex”, “gender”, and “sexuality” are often thought of
as synonymous. Sex is the biological state that
corresponds to what we might call a “man” of a
“woman”. Gender, is the social understanding of how
sex should be experience and how sex manifest
behavior, personality, preferences, capabilities and so
forth. Sexuality is the individual expression and
understanding of desire.
Performing Gender Online
Theorist Judith Butler (1990)

conceptualized gender as a performance.
Gender and sexuality came to be through
discourse and social processes. According to
disembodiment hypothesis, internet users are
free to actively choose which gender or
sexuality they are going to
Rules to Follow!
• Stick to safer sites
• Guard your password
• Limit what you share
• Remember that anything you put online or post
on a site is there forever, even if you try to delete
it.
• Do not be mean or embarrass other people
online.
• Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior
online.
• Be choosy about your online friends
• Be patient

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Who am I in the

According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995),

According to Marwick (2013), while the term

Theorist Judith Butler (1990)

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