Week 10

This week's readings touched on the way in which sites such as Facebook and Myspace help people to identify with themselves, sometimes even identifying themselves as somebody else. Myspace and Facebook are not only social networking sites, they are sites where people can present the kind of character or persona they would like to be, and the way they would like to be perceived. Particularly relevant to myspace, people create fan pages where they can roleplay their favourite celebrities or TV characters.

Creating different personas and roleplaying celebrities over social networking sites is often harmless. However, in some cases (as seen in the documentary 'Talhotblond' and 'Catfish'), the result can be heartbreak or even a tragic death.

Bibliography:
Booth, Paul(2008) 'Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification',
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25: 5, 514 — 536