Facebook Culture: Millennial Formation of Social Identity

Social Networking Sites have become a rising trend over the past decade as a source of interaction on the internet. Facebook.com, in particular, has become dangerously popular, with over 700 million active users to date. This study examines how Millennial’s use Facebook in order to regulate impression management and gain cultural capital through their virtual networks. Erving Goffman developed the concept of impression management as a method of censoring or altering the literal impression we are projecting to those around us in order to emanate a certain identity. Facebook aids this process by allowing us to actively edit exactly what we say about ourselves on a platform that is connected to everyone we know. Profiles were coded according to the nature of their About Me sections, profile photos, and count of online friends. Through simple random sampling amongst these categories of profiles, interviewees were selected. Each Millennial selected agreed to participate and was interviewed for a period of time ranging between thirty and sixty minutes. From this data, it was found that members of the Millennial generation use the site to manipulate the way they are perceived by various groups, like peers, coworkers, and parents, present on the site.