Culture and Nested Performance

Online Self Fragmentation Amongst Indonesian Youth

Abstract

Social media has changed the way we interact with each other. There are benefits of having social media, but there are also consequences too. One of the consequences is context collapse, where multiple audiences and context are combined into one big audience. Culture played a huge role in determining the types of performances that the Indonesian youths portray online. Firstly, on the platform level where they perform the front stage on Instagram and backstage on Twitter. Second, on the account level, they created multiple accounts on different accounts to further limit the audience and to present their real self. Finally, they used features to further limit the view of the audience by using a platform-specific filter. It can be concluded that this phenomenon is best termed as a ‘nested performance’. The different layers depicted different usages and thus different online ‘self’ presentations.