Identidad y subjetividad en las redes sociales virtuales: caso de Facebook.

Los llamados espacios virtuales, creados para establecer y fortalecer las redes sociales, han adquirido gran popularidad en los últimos 5 años. Sitios como Facebook o MySpace trascienden las barreras de lenguaje y las fronteras geográficas, permitiendo a los usuarios interactuar con una mayor cantidad de personas, a pesar de la distancia física o las diferencias culturales, en lo que Marshall McLuhan (1964) definiera como la era electrónica .El presente artículo da cuenta de reflexiones que han motivado el proyecto “La construcción de la identidad y subjetividad en los jóvenes en Colombia en las redes sociales virtuales. Caso de Facebook”, cuyo interés se centra en la creación y re-formulación de subjetividad e identidad en las redes sociales virtuales.Palabras clave: Redes sociales, Facebook, subjetividad, comunicaciones.Virtual spaces, created to establish and strengthen social networking have become very popular throughout the world in the last 5 years. Spaces such as Facebook or Myspace transcend language barriers, and go beyond frontiers, thus allowing users to interact with a larger amount of people in spite of distance, or cultural differences, getting close to what Marshall McLuhan defined as the electronic age (1964).Virtual social networks allow users to create their own profiles, based on how do they want to be known as by other users. This a process of re-creation of the self, that shows in what way users identify themselves as subjects, and to re-configurate such image, in order to promote a, perhaps, idealized version of themselves. This work pretends to approach this phenomenon as a process of communication in which users become both communicators and messages of themselves.In Colombia, Barranquilla, the fourth largest city, is not the exception to this process and the spread of virtual social networks. Indeed it has shown a rapid growth of users in the last two years. Hence, the document will show preliminary results obtained in the study, in which the interest is to understand, not only who the users of Facebook in Barranquilla are, but how do they create and re-formulate new subjectivities, through the use of these virtual social networks.Key words: Social networking, Facebook, Subjectivity, communication mapping.