Social Psychology Days in November

Come and say hello at the Annual Social Psychology Days 2014 21-22 November in Helsinki!
We will have two sessions, but it's not confirmed yet whether these both are held on Friday or do we have the second session shifted to Saturday.

In my presentation I will be concentrating on the theoretical underpinnings of my doctoral dissertation. And my main aim is to clarify the central argument I'm building in my work -- that is -- to make sense of all I got on my desk.
When the official program of the conference will be published I will update others' abstracts here as well.

Here you can see the abstract of my presentation:

Social media, social network services: What our user profiles do to us?

This presentation focuses on the experience of self-presentation in social network services (SNS). Self-presentation and impression management have been popular topics to study in the field of Internet research. Yet, the stronger links to self-identity and the explanations for passivity seem to lack presence. With this presentation I focus on the experienced identity conflict and stress that derives from the experience of self-presentation in SNSs. Furthermore, I argue that passivity can be more interesting than observed activity when the overall understanding of a user is the goal. When aiming at exploring passivity in SNSs the understanding needs to reach beyond visible actions and investigate meaning making and reasoning of a user.

The experience of maintaining an SNS user profile can be a psychologically complex process due to the context of imagined audiences (Marwick and boyd, 2010) and context collapse (boyd, 2002; Wesch, 2009). That experience deserves SNS researchers and self-identity researchers’ attention since the context induces psychologically unique requirements for self-presentation. What has self-presentation to do with self-identity? And how do SNS user profiles change the ways of how we see ourselves?

With a notion of profile work, that describes the complex process of strategic self-presentation in SNSs, I elaborate four different approaches of how self-identity relates to SNS user profiles, and why this relation matters. The four understandings consider profile work as an individual’s experience, as an analytical tool to discern between personal and social, as an umbrella framework for the SNS research field to employ, and, as a self-identity shaping socio-cultural process. The presentation calls for discussion from a variety of fields, such as social sciences, psychology, communication and human-computer interaction.