About this Research Topic

Background

Over the past six decades, since Erving Goffman (1959) proposed a very natural way of individual social interaction, self-presentation has emerged as an empirically tested perspective in how media and its contents can be managed and promoted. This phenomenon defines any behavior intended to create modify or maintain an impression of people perceived by others. Whenever people are uploading posts, texts, or photos, those lead people to think of them in a particular way. This approach has been applied to why people ever want to engage in self-presentation and when and how do they formulate impressions of themselves in the minds of other people.

In the context of online media communication, media are used as tools from impression management and as self-identification in social issues. Scholars have devoted significant energies to study media effects in the changing media platforms and paid increasing attention to examining the impacts of social media and new technologies on how individuals promoted themselves in various media formats.

In this Research Topic, we look for rigorous, original, and creative contributions that speak across multiple subfields of media, psychology, and communication. All theoretical approaches as well as methods of scholarly inquiry are welcome while the papers can be based on an empirical study, integrate a series of empirical pieces from developing a new model.

Specifically, the Research Topic focuses on the phenomenon of self-presentation, with perspectives from new media communication, social media impact, and digital self-promotions. We invite papers that analyze the causes, distribution, and impact of the self-presentation related to social media, algorithm, COVID pandemic, political participation, information seeking, and impression management, etc., by various methods and approaches such as survey data, big data, content analysis, and comparative studies.

• Further elaboration, expansion, and explication of the self-presentation and trajectory of future research
• How the concept/ theory has informed and/or transformed the practice of media
• Application of self-presentation strategies to address media issues or public diplomacy (e.g., having a Facebook profile as “wear masks,” or “BLM”
• The application and advancement of self-presentation in the social media landscape
• How the brand or organization utilized impression management to achieve user engagement
• Articulation of a social problem and solution derived from self-presentation
• Innovative approach of evaluating the relative importance among existing self-presentation’s motivational factors when using specific social media platforms (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Youtube.. etc)
• Understanding the role of media users in self-presentation
• Ethical factors or considerations associated with self-presentation with target / specific groups (e.g., minority)
• Measurement advancement in refining the operationalization of self-completion, self-enhancement, self-construction, etc.
• Use of self-presentation in Multiverse

Please submit your abstract (no more than 1000 words, pre-data collection acceptable) by 30 September, if you are interested. The editorial team will review your abstract to confirm your topic is aligned with our call. Then you can submit the full paper (usually original research format/12,000 word limit or brief research report format/4000 word limit. See article types for the details: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology#article-types) by 31 January 2022

Image credit: Shutterstock

Keywords: self-presentation, self-promotion, self-disclosure, impression management self-construction, social validation, social media

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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