Audience and user roles and engagement

The audience consists of social media consumers that have experienced and/or experience manipulation in profiled content. Their identity and reputation have been constructed through how people interact with their profile and how they present their profile.  

Our groups responses to the ‘5 Whys’ reflects a common reasoning behind our desire to engage with social media platforms. Our responses all indicate that our social media use provides us with connections. It is through social media that we connect with content that link us to those with similar interests, self-expression and manipulation of identity, material desires and friends. This is a common finding of social media and internet use.

A 2020 social media use study, that did focus on adolescents with communication struggles found that 11% of those who use social media use the internet for anything they desire, 89% specified that they used social media for recreational and passive use ((Bosse et al., 2020)

This is ultimately driving our ability to waste our time when we are drowned manipulative profiling. These ‘5 Whys’ relate our engagement with social media to how we seek to connect our identity, reputation to our taste regimes. As a younger demographic, audience we engage with social media because of this.

The audience and expected engagements is marketed towards people who seek this individual connection that is stripped of inauthentic content. This places emphasis on the meaningful connections to content that can be provided.

The role of the audience is to promote authenticity within their content and consider the authenticity of content on this platform. This invites engagement that focuses on individual expression of identity as opposed to performative posts that create the commonly desired image that then impacts their profiled content. Engagement focused on authenticity checks will be offered to demonstrate this intention, this will then be reflected in profiling.