Intervening in the Technologies Underlying Identity Shift

• In Event: An Intervention for Identity Shift: Unpacking the Challenges and Discrepancies of a CMC Theory and its Future

Abstract

Megan French (Stanford University, USA) is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Her work focuses on the impacts of social technologies on the self, using identity shift to explore how technology is used to both present and construct the self. French’s work on identity shift has been presented at ICA and is currently under review at Media Psychology. This research examined the role that social evaluation plays in identity shift effects, finding that the presence of an evaluation, regardless of valence, magnified identity shift effects. The publicness of a self-presentation is assumed to be an important condition for identity shift to occur. It is unclear, however, the mechanism underlying why audiences are necessary for behavior to be incorporated into self-perceptions. A previous explanation for identity shift has been the commitment to a behavior elicited by the presence of others. However, French’s work suggests that the fact that public behavior is not just seen, but judged, may drive identity shift effects. As a result, she would like to take this opportunity to discuss the potential mechanisms underlying identity shift and how future identity shift can work towards understanding not just when identity shift effects occur, but why they occur. As a communication scholar, she would like to focus on how identity shift is elicited by different communication technologies whose affordances may tap into the mechanisms underlying identity shift in different and interesting ways.

Author

• Megan French, Stanford University