Online Identity and Instagram: Study of How Youth Present Their Identity on Instagram

The issue of identity has found various ways to express itself thanks to the progress of technology. At present, various services and applications provide their users with the possibility of sharing their everyday life and identity in various ways through their mobile phones. Since identity is variable and can be transformed as a result of social experience and upon development of new communication procedures, the new social networks can remake people’s identity by providing new facilities and services. With an aim to describe how identities are presented in the Instagram, this paper manages to study the photographs posted on this social network by young and university student users through applying content analysis and textual analysis. It intends to respond to this question as to how and in what situations have the audience in the social spaces presented themselves. It has been clarified that the Instagram users use photographs as a medium to present themselves and share their privacy data in this space and in a reciprocal move remake their identity; a dynamic identity which is on the move and interacting in a social network.
They use the virtual space, according to Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, for their presentation and make an online identity which is trading off with their offline identity