This photographic project 'Don’t judge a facebook by its cover' comprises a portrait series of several facebook users. The first set of portraits examines the subjects in their offline habitats. The second set represents the ‘facebook’ identity the subject postulates online and was devised as a result of interviews as well as monitoring the participants’ facebook usage. The intention of the project is to critically explore the opportunities facebook affords the user to plead an essentialist identity. My research found, paradoxically, that this testifies to the subject's multi-facetted nature. I’ll preface the remainder of this article by outing myself as a serious facebook sceptic.

I elected to appraise facebook because of its omniscience among my contemporaries. Social networking is something I have always avoided. After receiving a facebook invitation from a friend which lead to a sign-up process I was suddenly presented with a swathe of white space indicating that it should be used to explain about ‘me’. This seemed like an overwhelming amount of space, what did I really have to say about myself? Conversely, how could I do my existence justice in this ultimately limited amount of space? Confronted with the arduous task of trying to reduce, qualify, and embellish my identity, I decided not to create a profile.

However, my lack of enthusiasm placed me in the minority amongst my peers. I watched friends eagerly create profiles and communicate with one another via connected profiles. When examining my friends’ profiles I was surprised that the anxiety I experienced when faced with the challenge of completing a paragraph about ‘me’ did not appear to be shared by them. Their profiles were saturated with personal claims and declarations of existence. What was more surprising however, was when I read ‘who’ my friends were on their profiles, I felt I was reading about different people entirely.

It was not simply a case of them privileging certain elements of their identity, as it would not be expected for anyone to give an unflattering overview of their character, i.e. John Smith is a huge football fan but is prone to losing his temper. That said, it seemed to me, that some of my friends were inventing slightly ‘cooler’ music tastes or slightly more ‘intellectual’ literary preferences. The pressure wielded by the white space to be ‘someone’ and the falsehood its contents evoked were immediate deterrents to me. Now, I know that my experience and knowledge of my friends is not the nucleus of their personality and just as I allow a specific element of my identity to prevail in their company, they did the same in mine, and presented another element of their self through their interaction on facebook.

The task of succinctly ‘encoding’ your identity via a social networking site is rendered all the more stressful by the fact that it will be ‘decoded’[i] by a wide audience at any time of the day, beyond the individual’s control. What’s more, it is constantly ‘decoded’ by an ever growing list of ‘friends’, each with a different value system, knowledge of you, and means of interpreting you. True, the same transpires offline, however if you consider what a facebook ‘friend’ comprises, online identity interpretation is severely more unstable.

Many users’ profiles comprise of ‘friends’ who are classmates they haven’t seen in years, relatives, colleagues, ex’s, ex’s friends, the list goes on. In fact, some participants involved in this research project had friend counts in excess of 700! Online, presented with such a wide gamut of ‘friends’, it is necessary to create an identity which tallies with all of these people’s experience of you. Although facebook claims that you choose who views your profile, the site heralds new level of social politics (to add to an already heavily politicised life) such as feeling obliged to accept the offer of friendship from an ex-partner who violated your trust or from somebody who bullied you in school.

The protective veil the internet affords the individual is a significant factor in cultivating an online identity. Behind the computer monitor the self does not experience the same socially accepted infrastructures as one would in a non-virtual setting. Face-to-face contact involves entering a densely layered paradigm of protocol, etiquette, and moral codes. Online however, one can say things to another outside the parameters of politesse and without the underestimated pressure to behave in a certain manner.

I do believe the post-modern being is both heterogeneous and complex, and therefore the social networking element to the self is equally valid to any other facet of the self that a wider offline audience may encounter. Facebook evidences theories of Hall (2000) and Giddens (1991) ‘that the structural transformations of the contemporary period – globalisation, disembedding, detraditionalisation – have unshackled the subject, enabling a reconstruction of individual and collective life stories and identities’[ii], i.e. the advent of new technology accounts for changes in identity, such as approaches to friendships and means of presenting and (re)presenting the self. How can such a global phenomenon, which has infiltrated the lives of 250 million users and those in their peripheries, not impact the way we portray and reinvent ourselves? Befriending old acquaintances and constantly updating them on your life via news feeds will inevitably shift social interaction.

The images here are an attempt to represent the post-modern self. The first set of portraits are intended to embody the offline self. The second set supposedly characterise the individual’s facebook persona or who facebook allows them to be. Both images are inevitably staged and the ‘offline’ self is as authentic as it can be considering the Barthean problem of the self fracturing when a camera is placed before them. The images become increasingly complex when you consider the possibility that the participants used this exercise to elucidate upon another facet of their identity, knowing the audience it may reach is even less controlled than in facebook circles. Identity, it seems, is as easy to capture as smoke.

Alice Planel is giving up smoking after this last one

Alice Planel is an international woman of mystery

Arizona Smith is a school girl by day

Arizona 'Rave' Smith is a rave-scene-queen

David Cummins is a careful cyclist

David Cummins is a delightful eccentric

Kate McLaughlin is pulling another all-nighter

Kate McLaughlin is writing a fabulous screenplay

Sean Roberts takes the 18.17 London Overground from Euston 5 days a week

Sean Roberts is making the most of living in London

More info about Holly McGlynn