Networked Publics and Identity Construction: Towards an Era of Virtual Socialization

In the era of digital age where the rate of information exchange and sharing have gone extremely high, the line of demarcation between the sender and the receiver in a communication act came to be less existent. With the rise of new media technologies, social networking sites (SNS) such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. have increasingly become a common platform for networking among people. The term 'networked publics' became a more appropriate term for the broad category of users in these virtual networking platforms. One of the most important characteristic features of social networking is the issue of self constructed identity and representation. This emerging trend has become the key towards virtual socialization amongst the networked publics. Based on strong theoretical backgrounds of self and identity construction, this paper tries to explore the various aspects of socialization in the virtual space through a wide array of literature surveys. Notwithstanding their privacy concerns, the willingness to self expose themselves among the public and to what extent people reveal their "self" in the process of identity construction will be highlighted thoroughly in the paper.