It would seem that from the three articles, their authors/subjects either find social media to be a liberating or hindering aspect to their identity. While Bev Gooden (“Hashtag Activism”), Joseph Delgado and Roxanne Gay (“Writers of Color..”) use social media as a way to reach out into communities - in their instances, communities that suffer from oppression - while Erin Ruddy (“Fakebooking”) feels limited by her social media, believing that she cannot post a pictures that is only half-true. Gooden, Delgado and Gay all use social media to strengthen how they identify themselves; Gooden as a survivor of domestic abuse, Delgado as a queer poet, and Gay as a writer of color. They all take a step to create a collective community of freedom and respect. “It [community] is a concept both seductive and powerful,” Harris wrote, “one that offers us a view of shared purpose and effort….the gambit of community, once offered, is almost impossible to decline - since what is invoked is a community of those in power, of those who know the accepted ways of writing and interpreting texts,” (“The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing”).
Ruddy, on the other hand, felt that by posting the picture of her children with a snowmen she would be betraying her own identity in a way, by presenting a situation that as she describes, was not as joyful as her snapshot made it seem. Harris wrote, “We do not write simply as individuals, but we do not write simply as members of a community either. The point is, to borrow a turn of argument from Stanley Fish, that one does not first decide to act as a member of one community rather than some other, and then attempt to conform to its (rather than some other's) set of beliefs and practices.” This seems to be the dilemma that Ruddy faced, that even though it might be a norm to post a seemingly harmless pictures of her kids, it went against her own will to conform to that community.
While I don’t belong to any specific social media communities, other than the social media platform itself like the twitter/tumblr community and whatnot, I have included myself into online communities that work specifically to include and present works of art, photography, and writing. And while I do belong to these communities, I don’t believe any of them are huge benefactors in developing my identity; or maybe they are and I am just blind to it, the possibility is not ridiculous.
I think it's really interesting that you don't see the online communities you are a part of as interval to creating your identity. However, do you think you choose to represent yourself in a particular way on these online communities, even the broader communities like Twitter and tumbler? I would guess that you make conscious choices about how you represent yourself to these different groups. Even though you may not consciously see these groups as helping to construct your identity, do you think your interaction on these groups and the norms of the discourse community – – like the example you give from the Ruddy Article – – constrain or enable particular ways of representing your identity to these groups?
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