The Internet represents the first genuine alternative to interpersonal communication since our distant ancestors’ first utterings. With this new mode of communication comes a shift in the way we think about and manage our identities. A common belief is that online social networking promotes a flexible, multifaceted identity. Whilst this may be the case for earlier social networking (MUDs, bulletin boards, IRCs, etc), this paper argues that, since the establishment of web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the opposite is true.

 
Ever since humans began to cooperate with each other around 30,000 years ago, we have carefully managed our identities to present an idealised version of ourselves: quite simply a version that we believe our peers will like. Until very recently, the only means by which to do this was face-to-face, via written correspondence or telephone. Owing to the ‘real world’ nature of these methods of communication, the groups of people we interact with are necessarily quite small, well-defined and discrete. Consequently, famous sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens and Erving Goffman have favoured the idea that identity is flexible and multiple – that is, different depending on which audience we happen to be communicating with at any given time.

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