A Study of "Intimate Strangers"

I have to read a lot of scholarly articles while writing papers and I came across one of the most interesting ones I’ve ever read a couple days ago. For my social psychology class I’m writing a paper on the way people present themselves on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and what kind of factors influence the type of information they choose to display and how to display it.

The article is called The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others (you can read it here). Basically, this article tries to explain the opposite phenomena I wanted to, yet I was still able to fit it into my paper somehow. What it tries to examine is the impact of others (in the online world) on the conception of self, specifically how the online environment alters the way we come to view ourselves. This study attempts to explain this within the context of teenagers who go online and use social networking sites because they are the ones who have yet to form a stable view of themselves. It's worthy of reading especially if you've been using social networking sites for most of your teenage years, you'll definitely relate to it.