Becoming “us” in digital spaces: How online users creatively and strategically exploit social media affordances to build up social identity

• Published in: Acta psychologica Vol. 228; p. 103643
• Main Authors: Lüders, Adrian, Dinkelberg, Alejandro, Quayle, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.08.2022; Elsevier
• Subjects: Computational social science; Online behavior; Social identity theory; Social media; Social networks; Social identity theory; Social networks; Computational social science; Social media; Online behavior
• ISSN: 0001-6918; 1873-6297; 1873-6297
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103643

Social media has become a major platform for information-exchange, discourse, and protest and has been linked to a wide range of pressing macro developments. Consequenlty, there is significant interest from scholars as well as from the wider publuc to understand how social media affordances interact with human behavior. In attempts to address these demands, the present article borrows from the social identity tradition to explain group formation processes in Web 2.0 and other online ecosystems. We propose that online users creatively and strategically exploit the affordances provided by platforms and technologies to construct and perform collective selfhood. We emphasize the relevance of community development, norm consensualization, and emotional alignment as recursive dynamic processes that – in symbiosis – provide a functional basis for social identities. We outline these proposed mechanisms based on a corpus of interdisciplinary literature and suggest avenues for future research. •Online realities and the social interactions that occur within these realities are mutually constituting each other•Users exploit platform affordances to connect with like-minded others and distance themselves from people with conflicting belief-sets•Building up agentic communities, consensualizing around shared narratives, and aligning emotions – in symbiosis - facilitate the emergence of collective selfhood•A transdisciplinary and multi-methodological agenda is best suited to tackle the recursive and dynamic relationships that underly the emergence of online behavior