FINAL DESTINATIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA JOURNEYS: THE FRAGMENTED SELF

Year 2020, Volume: 4 Issue: 3, 11 - 26, 31.12.2020

Burcu Kaya Erdem

Abstract

The self is established through knowledge of self, the projection of others’ view of the self, and self-evaluation. According to Goffman, social relations which are established in communications constitute a process of presenting the “self” to others to be accepted or rejected. Burgoon states the five basic components of the self as material, psychological, emotional, social, and ideal. The practices of an individual who is a user of multiple social media platforms can vary on each of the media. It wouldn’t be false to suggest that individuals who can act accord-ing to the behavioral patterns required by each social media platform, turn exclu-sively towards behavior patterns of the social aspect of self and a fragmented formation of self by alienating other components. Thus, it can also be suggested that the fragmented self, self that is categorized based on uses and practices of different social media platforms with which the individual interacts, causes disas-sociation from a sense of belonging to individuals’ ideal selves. The study aims to relay the formation of the fragmented self in the context of relationality of so-cial media and self, and to propound said transformation’s projections within individuals’ perceptions. Therefore, the subject of “fragmented self on social media”, which constitutes the content of this study, is exemplified by the social media trend started by singer Dolly Parton in the first month of 2020, “Dolly Parton Challenge”. Dolly Parton shared her projections on her Facebook, Linkedin, Tinder and Instagram accounts in one visual, causing thousands of users to share their different visuals according to different social media accounts. Therefore, said trend is approached as an effective example of relaying the trans-formation of fragmented identity. The study aims to relay the formation of frag-mented self in the context of the relationality of self and social media, and to pre-sent the reflections of said formation on individuals’ presentation of self. Start-ing from this point of view, this descriptive study proposes an assessment on social media users’ presentation of fragmented self by online questionnaire forms and the likert scale.

Keywords

Fragmented self, social self, social media trends, Dolly Parton Challenge

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