Self-presentation of lgbt members and social media

Self-Presentation

Self-presentation is how a person presents himself or herself to an audience. He or she will choose which information to disclose to provide an image that would be appealing to the desired audience. The main factor that fuels the framing of one’s self is social desirability. Self-presentation will yield to positive affirmation thus, Goffman (1959) suggests that people would act differently to the public for individuals have an idea of their ideal self and try to emulate this.

Social media and LGBTQ

According to academics that “ the internet would be able to free the youth, especially the queer, from the limitations of geography”. Thus, the emergence of the social media has been of great advantage and has allowed the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) to be able to have a space in order to express themselves, the kind of social media that emerged during this period exhibits high value of anonymity to its users wherein it they are able to create profiles, post, have an outlook of connected users and interact with content created by other users thus majority of the studies done (e. g., McRea, 1997; Turkle, 1995) has revealed that the self-presentation of the LGBTQ in these medium are highly authentic. The challenge that is faced with Facebook is that the value of anonymity has faded since people that are connected online tend to interact offline as well. To address this challenge, the LGBTQ have varied identity management strategies so as to only show information which they want their audience to see.

LGBT situation in the Philippines

Given these, the LGBTQ population of the Philippines is widely tolerated but notes that they are not accepted. In the news article, Ging Cristobal says that the rainbow community is considered to be second class or third class citizens that is tolerated by Filipinos who are likely saying that “ We have to endure you… but only upto here” and such statement indicates that the LGBTQ community has only certain limitations. Rainbow Rights Philippines president Jazz Tamayo also added that the continued discrimination they are currently facing is because of the stereotypes. Naomi Fontanos, executive director of Gender and Development Advocates Philippines notes that they need protection, noting that the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Bill is very essential especially to the trans community who are experiencing violence in the form of physical, emotional and psychological. With this, it is important to know how these male homosexuals present themselves both in the social media and in everyday lives.