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Maria Alvarez

Professor Jeniffer Rodrick

English 115

03 December 2019

Two Identities One Body

The transition from being a teenager to becoming an adult is the most important and

critical part of a person's life because is the last time a person goes through major changes to

their personality, their physical and their identity. In the past teens formed their identities based

on the things that surround them like their family, their school, their community and even their

religion, this is because their main goal was to feel accepted and fit in with those around them. In

today’s society, teens are being influenced by the social media; their followers, famous

people/influencers, brands, different cultures and different ideologies that they have access to

thanks to technology. This has given teenagers the freedom to build their own identity and their

thinking in many different ways. However this does not mean that the things they express online

and who they are online is accepted by those surrounding them in real life, therefore technology

has affected teens in a bad way by making them build two different identities, their identity

online and their identity in real life.

As a teen you have the need to feel accepted or feel like you are part of a group. For

example in the past if you liked sports you try to fit in with the athletes but if you liked making

music then you were more likely to hang out with the band members; you would dress like them,

talk like them, watch the same things that they did, etc. In modern times is a bit different, teens

are using social media to fit in and feel accepted. Danah Boyd claims that adolescents use social
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media in ' cool building, ' closely creating self-images with words, images, and media to handle

the impression others have of them. Their goal is to look ' cool ' and create peer validation. In the

article “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage

Social Life” she states ““Throughout the country, young people were logging in, creating

elaborate profiles, publicly articulating their relationships with other participants, and writing

extensive comments back and forth… many considered participation on the key social network

sites... essential to being seen as cool at school.” (Boyd pg.1). This demonstrates that teens now

are using images and posts to find peer validation, mostly in their schools, and to be seen as

“cool” by their friends. For example instead of hanging out with their friends teens now post

similar pictures to the ones their friends post or follow the same people that their friends do. .

Boyd also states “I argue that social network sites are a type of networked public with four

properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life: persistence, searchability,

exact copyability, and invisible audiences. These properties fundamentally alter social dynamics,

complicating the ways in which people interact.” (Boyd pg.2). This just goes to show that in

today's world to fit in school teens are using social media to build their identity but it has

affected the way teens interact in real life which might cause teens to not have the social skills

they need in life.

Teens ​start to build a different identity online because they know that there are things that

their parents, family, friends and community might find hard to accept about them for example if

a guy is gay maybe he pretends to be straight in real life but when he goes online he is a different

person with a different personality. Teens tend to become more open online because they get a

lot of support from strangers but also they feel safe knowing that no one online really knows who
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they are. Hope Jensen Schau and Mary C. Gilly discuss in their article, “We Are What We Post?

Self-Presentation in Personal Web Space”, how individuals suppress aspects of their life in order

to maintain a desired self image, “Strategies of self presentation often revolve around repressing

personal information or supplanting it with modified or fabricated details more congruent with a

desired self” (Schau and Gilly pg. 387). Demonstrating that teenagers tend to hide or change

things about them to sound more appealing to people, therefore they start to lie about who they

are in real life and online, they start to develop two different identities. The authors also state in

the article that, “The art of self-presentation is both a manipulation of signs and an embodied

representation and experience to impart identity” (Schau and Gilly pg. 387). Indicating that teens

usually manipulate others to make them think good of them or just simply to be able to live up to

their reputation and expectations, this happens in real life and online.

The first identity a teen builds is caused by the exposure to their family, friends and

community, then later in their life when they get access to the web and social media teens start

to build a different identity because they get exposed to things all around the world that maybe

they do not see in their surroundings. They start to post images, videos, quotes, songs and other

sorts of things that might be inappropriate for their age or that typically their family will

disapprove of. Their family disapproval does not stop them from posting these things because

they know they can hide it from their parents and they find acceptance and encouragement from

strangers. For instance in the TV show “Euphoria” on episode 03 “Made You Look” Rue the

main character talks about Kat Hernandez’s life, played by ​Barbie Ferreira, Rue says that Kat is

extremely popular online because the fanfictions she writes about famous people, her followers

lover her admire her when in real life she gets called “fat” and she gets bullied. This is a clear
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example of teens creating a new identity, when she writes her fanfictions she feels accepted and

good about herself but she never talks about that in real life because she knows she will be

judged by her peers and her parents. Later in this episode we see Kat creating a PornHub account

because she seen the a leaked video of her having sex but what made her want to creat an

account were the comments in that video admiring her body and praising how beutiful she was,

this made her feel accepted and it gave her more cofidence in herself. After creating the account

she starts to facetime men online in exchange for money, when asked by her friends and her

parents she lies and hides her actions. She realized that the things she was doing online will not

be accepted by her friend and family because sex and porn is not something that is accepted or

normilized by her culture. Although this is just a TV show these things occur more often in real

life, many teens find it making these type of content in exchange for money easy and it becomes

their way of living but they hide it from their family, friends and peers, that is why in many

videos these teens either hide or cover their face to not be recognized.

Parents tend to see their own children as innocent people that will never do or say bad

things and obviously teens want and try to live up to this image their parents created about them

to make them feel proud. Due to this teens start to hide the way they talk and the things they post

online. Usually teens create secret accounts that their parents do not know about but in today's

world, a new language has been created thanks to texting and the use of abbreviations and

emojis. Teenagers use this kind of language for sexting or to cover up something bad they are

doing and because parents and other adults do not understand this hidden messages they see it as

something innocent. In their article ​‘Snapchat’, youth subjectivities and sexuality: disappearing

media and the discourse of youth innocence.” the authors Jennifer Charteris, Sue Gregory and
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Yvonne Masters discuss the shift that occurs on teenagers relationships and to how much

innocence teens actually have when they use social media. ​“​Social steganography is a process of

hiding information in plain sight. These messages are apparent to those 'in the know' and

meaningless to those who are not. Social steganography excludes people who are not part of the

cycle of teen gossip – namely parents, teachers and peers who are outside their immediate social

sphere.” (Charteris, Gregory, Masters). We are shown that the only people aware of this type of

new language or codes are teens and their circle of online or real friends, this excludes parents

and other adults from knowing the real meaning behind these messages. “We posit that one may

be that social steganography is a response to… the associated adult surveillance.” (Charteris,

Gregory, Masters). Indicating that the overall goal of teenagers using these codes and hidden

messages is to hide the bad things that they are doing from their parents, to maintain that image

of innocence.

In conclusion, technology and social media has caused teenagers to build two different

identities with the simple goal of finding validation from those around them and those online.

This is because when teens are online they turn into someone that they would like to be, but they

know they can’t be in real life because it is disapproved by their parents, friends and community

around them. Having two identities is like having two different people living inside one body,

this has become true to some people that show their online persona to be one and their real life

identity to be a completely different one. Teens built two identities, their real life identity that

consists of them living up to the image that the people around them have created for them and

the other one is their online identity that consists of them lying about things in their real life to
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make themselves more desirable and become the version of themselves they wish they were in

reality.
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Work Cited Page

Boyd, Danah. (2007) “​Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked

Publics in Teenage Social Life.​” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth,

Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Accessed 12/03/2019. ​https://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pd​f

Charteris, Jennifer, ​Yvonne​. ​“‘Snapchat’, Youth Subjectivities and Sexuality:

Disappearing Media and the Discourse of Youth Innocence.” ​Gender and Education,​ 2017, pp.

1–17. ​Accessed 12/03/2019

http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libproxy.csun.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=c784738b-d8cf-4fe

f-8fc4-713005dcdd32%40pdc-v-sessmgr03&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN

=127561628&db=aph

“​Euphoria S01E03 Trailer | 'Made You Look' | Rotten Tomatoes TV”​, ​Euphoria, ​written

by   ​Sam Levinson, directed by Sam Levison, HBO June 30, 2019. Youtube. Accessed

12/03/2019. ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpEhbQVUrps

Schau, Hope Jensen, and Gilly, Mary C. “We Are What We Post? Self-Presentation in

Personal Web Space.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 30, no. 3, 2003, pp. 385–404.

Accessed 12/03/2019

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.6954&rep=rep1&type=pdf