Not/All about Fun: College Students’ Social Norms and Identity Construction on Facebook

Youth identity that explores the relationship between self and society is a central concern of youth studies. The very question whether there is still as much influence of social background on identity construction or identity is more individually achieved has aroused debates in youth studies. Nowadays young people live in a world of social media where they utilize multimedia resources to express themselves and manage interpersonal relationships in different ways. Facebook has become the most popular social network site among college students in Taiwan and has begun to play a substantial role in their college life. The purpose of my research is to reveal how college students in Taiwan interpret and negotiate the social norms regulating their online interpersonal relationships and how they construct their identities regarding impression management and cultural consumption on Facebook. Based in Taipei, Taiwan, this research applied a multi-sited approach and methods including in-person interviews, online observation and a visual approach of photographic analysis. I refer to the conceptions of performance introduced by E. Goffman, distinction proposed by P. Bourdieu, and surveillance developed by M. Foucault as the primary theoretical frameworks in this research. My research reveals a potential cultural pedagogy of Facebook in higher-education practices in terms of obligated sociality and impression management. I suggest that young people face the pressure of their day-to-day practices on social network sites because it is not about fun—instead, it is about how to maintain their college student identity online regarding school work, friendship, emotion expression, and self-image. In this context, I examine how they interpret and negotiate with the norms—obligated sociality, un/certainty in keeping friendships and the rules of emotion expression, and emphasis on struggles and contradictions when they confront the norms. I argue that college students use metaphor as an expression of negative emotion to deal with the struggles between publicity, privacy and belonging. I suggest that individuals demonstrate unifying and consistent practices of identity construction between online and offline activity through different cognitive structures of identity construction, which are socially produced, exercised by habitus, and different from socio-economic status. My argument contributes to the debates on identity in youth studies for it provides the real-world evidence and connects the logic of identity construction practices online to the ones offline