People You May Know: Homosexual Men's Identity in the Time of Social Networking Services

Summary

Abstract

In the following article several key points are highlighted from a doctoral thesis enti-tled Gay Men, Social Media and Self-presentation: Managing Identities in Gaydar, Facebook and Beyond written by Elijah M. Cassidy at the University of Technology in Queensland, Australia. The dissertation focuses on the ways in which homosexual men, who use both niche and mainstream Social Network Services (SNS), manage their identities therein. The research uncovers the entanglements of various practices employed in both spaces and presents complex privacy concerns. It also refers to manifold peculiarities of Inter-net-mediated communication and the ambivalent impact of mainstream and niche SNSs on the sense of collectivity of the researched group. Having presented the main ideas of Cassidy's research I determine the connection between his conclusions and those drawn from two Polish studies which recently treaded the relatively uncharted waters of this research area.

Key words: internet-mediated communication, identity, queer studies, social media

My interest in how homosexual users of Social Networking Services shape and manage their identities was sparked by a doctoral dissertation enti-tled: “Gay men, social media and self-presentation: managing identities in Gaydar, Facebook and beyond” written in 2013 by Elija M. Cassidy at the University of Technology in Queensland, Australia. In my paper I would like to take a closer look at this research and consider the relevance of an Australian academic's questions in a Polish context. The following abbre-viations will be used in the course of this paper–SNS (Social Networking Service), RL (Real Life, situations which are not Internet-mediated, offline), FB (Facebook) and GD (Gaydar).Having acknowledged the adequacy of the term “research participants” in the case of the Australian qualitative research, due to linguistic aptness I will be using it interchangeably with the term “respondents”.

The research question raised by Cassidy was supposed to investigate “how do the cultures and practices surrounding identity management on Gaydar, as an example of an existing, community-specific SNS, fit into the broader ecology of its users’ engagements with newer mainstream SNSs, such as Facebook, and their identity management processes in this space” (Cassidy 9).In other words, Cassidy aimed to research how homosexual men between 18–28, living in the city of Brisbane, use two types of SNSs in the process of identity management and what similarities and differences of activities within these two spaces can be observed.