Self-Presentation Strategies in Social Media

The research objectives

The purpose of the study is to identify typical self-presentation strategies for social media users. The following research objectives have been identified:

1. To consider the phenomenon of self-presentation, as a means of managing impressions and image design.
2. To analyse the existing theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of self-presentation.
3. Identify the essential features of self-presentation in social media.
4. Identify typical self-presentation strategies in social media and their dependence on certain social factors (gender, age, education, geography, lifestyle, etc.).

Methodology

The following research methods will be conducted:
Method for analysing content. Contents contain information that the Internet user himself provides, and there is no need to contact him personally, it is enough that he wrote. In addition, information from such sources is generated by a person not for sociological research, but for personal purposes; therefore, the probability of the so-called “fitting” of the data to the expectations of the researcher is reduced.
Visual anthropology method for analysing visual documents. The use of this method is explained by the fact that photography is an important tool for self-presentation. What is important here is what kind of photo the user chooses as the main one (“avatar”), what he wants to show it. It is also necessary to analyse which images as a whole are published by the user, what they bring to the image of his virtual “me”.
Post-demography is an analysis of user profiles, in which attention is paid not only and not so much to demographic characteristics (gender, age, income, race), but also to tastes and interests of the user (for example, music selection, hobby).