Identity Theory in a Digital Age

This chapter shows how identity theory is useful in theorizing digitally mediated sociality and how new technological advancements push the identity theory model. Beginning with social structures, it examines how social media platforms are at once open and closed, posing questions about the availability of identities for social media users. It addresses the identity processes of performance and verification, disentangling the ways that users both gain and relinquish control over their identity meanings. It shows how the outcomes of identity verification processesself-worth, self-efficacy, and authenticityhelp explain complex and sometimes contradictory findings about the relationship between digitally mediated interaction and psychological well-being. It concludes with two areas of emergent research within identity theory: multiple identities and identity change, for which social media provoke essential questions and provide important sources of data. The chapter shows that advances in social media studies dovetail in theoretically fruitful ways with advances in identity theory.