The Virtual Me. A New Way and Practice of Identity Construction and Language Use
The Virtual Me. A New Way and Practice of Identity Construction and Language Use

Summary/Abstract: The paper is based on a sociological research (2009) focused on the population of a social networking site in a smaller East European town (Miercurea Ciuc, Romania). 1327 iWiW accounts were chosen by sampling and a database was created based on the visible data from each account. Using this database, we can draw a picture about this town’s iWiW users: along what kind of socio-demographic parameters we can describe its population, what they present about themselves, how many connections they have, how much information they share, what they say about themselves and in what way. Besides the database, content analysis was used as well. This was applied in two main categories: (1.) about myself: given answers to the open questions of the profile page: length (whether there are short or long phrases), language (Hungarian or other), spelling (correct, incorrect, use of emoticons), originality (own words or quotations), style (sober or funny, likely or unlikely valid), and (2.) the photographs they share, along five aspects: character(s) (presented on the picture), theme (of the profile picture), place, subtitle (whether there are any or none, metaphoric or simple ones, in which language, whether there are any emoticons used) and design (whether they are “original” or “edited”). A comparison was also made between younger and older users (under the age of 20 and older than 20), with regard to the major differences between different age-groups: the younger users’ “behavior” was very dissimilar to that of all the other users.

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