The social construction of the self through experience in social networks - hypermodernity, lightness and adolescence

Abstract

This work aimed to explore the phenomenon of social construction and identity, in a crossroads with hypermodernity and lightness, theorized by Lipovetsky. Starting from an empirical activity developed with a group of 24 young people attending secondary school, this reflection sought to investigate the concepts and test approaches in order to promote the understanding of the ways in which young people perceive their identity and how they experience life through the screens. Three ideas emerged as a starting point: firstly, the notion of the adolescents' (almost) total immersion in the digital technologies (Lemos, 2009), an aspect that points a need for their ways of being to be understood from the observation of their non-digital behaviors; secondly, the idea of building a digital identity that subsists in new social networks and that is distinguished from real identities (Stone, 1996; Turkle, 1995); and finally, the assumption that the reading of information and events presented by the digital world impacts their posture on digital networks. As a result, we highlight -within the group in observation -a) the tendency to construct the identity in the digital, with the objective of promoting their inclusion in social media and of showing a worked self-image; b) an approximation to the new paradigm of the hypermodern social structure, understanding that the behaviors depend essentially on the social structure where they live and the relations established between them.