Presentation of Self, Groups, and Data

In these chapters, authors discuss the composition of identity in social media spaces, the politics of interfaces, and the ways users perform across platforms. Central themes call audiences to question the assumptions they hold about socially-constructed networks, how they build and maintain networks online and the nature of the content they share and create in social networks. Such information is timely and relevant for anyone who uses, researches, or teaches social media, because the implications of the practices we engage in are not always apparent. For instance, data collection while sometimes obvious is most often oblique. As a group, the chapters in this section highlight that as new platforms emerge and gain new platforms popping up and gaining in popularity, it is difficult to pin down the societal, economic, ethical, and political consequences of composing and circulating writing on social media. Rhetoric and composition have much to offer in this quest for understanding as scholarship considers ecologies of production, the embodiment of agency, and studies of digital activism. As Kristin Arola points out in her chapter, “Indigenous Interfaces,” a consideration of how and for whom interfaces are created matters, because it speaks to how power is circulated. Most authors in this section acknowledge and speak to this sentiment – that an understanding of the ecologies, spaces, and behaviors appropriated in social media affect our agency and identity outside of social media. In a more positive example of how social media can change social constructions, Kara Poe Alexander and Leslie Hahner examine how platforms such as Instagram can be used to successfully change stereotypes within a community. In their chapter, “The Intimate Screen: Revisualizing Understandings of Down Syndrome Through Digital Activism on Instagram,” Alexander and Hahner focus on how a mother of two children with Down Syndrome uses social media to normalize the stigma surrounding the condition by sharing intimate moments in her kids lives that highlight everyday interactions of her kids and their mother.