Oline Identities

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Summary For many, Facebook has shifted from being the site on which to document carefree student days to a space where a more professional identity can play out. Recruiters have for some time examined social media profiles, something that raises important privacy questions. Facebook even now offers its own, work-focused Facebook app, Workplace, showing the company’s desire to expand into more areas of our lives. Two participants in our study were final year medical students. Coached in a job-seeking seminar, they were told that the recruitment team would carry out web searches on the candidates, including Facebook pages. This was an incentive for them to tidy up their profiles, and reflect on how many years of Facebook posts might be interpreted by potential employers and patients. The sociologist Anthony Giddens uses the expression “the reflexive project of the self” to explain how personal identity is not fixed in stone, but an ongoing project that we constantly work on. This concept is particularly applicable to social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter because it captures the way these services are embedded into young peoples’ lives, and their professional development.