خودارائه گری آنلاین استراتژیک: مطالعه میان فرهنگی

Abstract Contemporary social networking sites (SNSs) make idealized self-presentation and image maintenance difficult because users’ audiences are becoming more diverse and individual users must negotiate often unanticipated other-provided information in the form of text posts and digital images on their profile pages. This cross-cultural study examines how audience-related variables affect a range of strategic self-presentation and image management behaviors online. Results from samples of Singaporean and American SNS users (N = 411) show that while Americans update their profiles with text-based wall posts more frequently, Singaporeans share significantly more photos. Audience diversity is positively associated with active management of other-provided information, and females share more photos and actively manage unwanted photo tagging. Cultural identity and the tendency to ‘friend’ unknown others interact on managing other-provided wall posts; individualistic cultural identity exhibited positive relationships with these reactions for those less likely to friend unknown others but negative ones for those more likely to friend unknown others. Implications for the theoretical understanding of and practical suggestions about self-presentation online are discussed.

1. Introduction Self-presentation is “the process of controlling how one is perceived by other people” (Leary, 1995, p. 2) and is key to relationship inception and development. In order to construct positive images, individuals selectively provide information about themselves and carefully cater this information in response to others’ feedback (Goffman, 1959). Internet-based communication tools provide new opportunities for self-presentation, especially via social networking sites (SNSs) which allow users to strategically create custom profile pages. Here, users provide information about themselves via a variety of different modes of communication, ranging from using plain text to report personal information, update status, and write comments on friend’s profile pages, to sharing a prolific amount of images. However, individual users are not the only source of information about themselves. Members of their online networks also contribute information to their profile page. These social network ‘friends’ can publicly comment on an individual’s status updates, add text-based posts to their friend’s profile pages, and connect individual profile owners with shared digital content like photos, a behavior known as photo tagging. Once an individual user is tagged in a photo, that photo becomes visible to visitors of his or her profile page. More importantly, these content additions can be made at any time without permission of the profile page owner. These interactions reduce the profile page owner’s control over the information about themselves (Ramirez & Walther, 2009). This is problematic for the pursuit of idealized self-presentation because information provided by others (other-provided information, 1 or OPI) may be inconsistent with the strategic image-based goals of profile owners. Compared with information provided by profile owners themselves (self-provided information, 2 or SPI), OPI is less likely to be manipulated, more credible, and thus can have a greater impact on how profile owners are perceived ( Walther et al., 2009 and Walther et al., 2008). The multiple audience problem poses additional challenges (Leary, 1995). Today, users’ online networks encompass family members, friends from school and work, as well as total strangers (Hampton, Goulet, Rainie, & Purcell, 2011). This may be problematic because different audience segments have different expectations about one’s public image (Binder, Howes, & Sutcliffe, 2009), and SNS users must adjust their public image to expectations of all these segments (Goffman, 1959). As traditional geographic and temporal boundaries in face-to-face communication diminish during online communication, it becomes difficult to manage diverse audience segments simultaneously in closed systems like SNS (Binder et al., 2009 and boyd, 2008). This increases the chances that OPI becomes problematic and thus poses challenges to effective self-presentation. Audience characteristics and individual cultural identity effect self-presentation online. Culture is a broad concept associated with national identity and gender (Hofstede, 1980 and Maltz and Borker, 1982). Scholarship has found cultural- and gender-based differences in self-presentation behaviors on- and offline (Rosen, Stefanone, & Lackaff, 2010). Research also demonstrates that online social network (i.e., audience) characteristics could affect self-presentation behaviors (Binder et al., 2009). However, the relationships between culture, idiosyncratic audience characteristics, and how individuals manage OPI to present themselves in a positive light online, remain unclear. The purpose of this research is to address these gaps by examining factors that affect how individuals share self-provided text- and image-based information in the form of wall posts and photos, and how they manage other-provided visual and text-based information on their profiles. Drawing on research about protective self-presentation ( Arkin, 1981), the individualism-collectivism dichotomy ( Hofstede, 1980), the gender-as-culture argument ( Maltz & Borker, 1982), and the analysis of social network structure ( Binder et al., 2009), we propose to examine how cultural identity, gender, and specific audience characteristics affect a range of self-presentation behaviors online.

6. Conclusion This research contributes to understanding of online self-presentation in an intercultural context characterized by an abundance of OPI generated by large, diverse audiences. Culture has been found to influence self-presentation behaviors, together with audience characteristics. Our findings provide evidence that self-presentation is a function of self-audience interaction, and that cultural norms that guide offline interaction persist online and continue to guide how individuals present themselves.