How Social Media Shape Identities and Discourses in Professional Digital Settings: Self Communication or Self Branding?
This chapter draws attention to how users discursively present and promote themselves in a professional digital setting, namely LinkedIn, and how social media technology affects users' agency and, as a consequence, their identity construction. Four categories of LinkedIn profiles, that is, journalists, photographers, web managers and project managers, are investigated in order to identify which verbal resources these professionals exploit to present themselves. Furthermore, after describing the digital technologies through which users carry out their Self branding process, the author shows how these technical devices channel meaning potential. In fact, findings demonstrate that the effective and strategic rhetoric of LinkedIn profiles not only resides in the data uploaded by users but also in how the algorithms which fuel the platforms manipulate these data.