The Notion of the Self and the Issue of Methodology on Social Media Research

Abstract

The prominence of social media in our lives and our social world is impossible to deny. The uniqueness of social media is its sociality. Thus, the users’ selves are constantly being put at the centre of this ever-changing technology. While the concept of the self has a long history in philosophical traditions and remains a subject of discussion in other modern disciplines, it has been rarely investigated by social media research. While a large amount of social media research has focused on the effects and use of social media, few researchers have looked into the nature of the self. Furthermore, much of social media research has been dominated by empirical research. Despite having to deal with such a concept that has heavy philosophical implications, such as the self, the metaphysical experience of the self seems to have fallen out of context. Therefore, this paper attempted to explore and establish a link between the philosophical concept of the self and social media in a bid to systematise and craft the research method in a way that would be interdisciplinary and give equal importance to the conceptual and empirical concerns.