<p>Abstract</p><p>Title: Who are you? Who am I? – Charades in the mediated world of today. A study of the construction of identity at Facebook.</p><p>(Vem är du? Vem är jag? – Charader i dagens medierade värld. En studie av identitetskonstruktionen på Facebook.)</p><p>Number of pages: 58 (66 including enclosures.)</p><p>Author: Mathilda Wahlund</p><p>Tutor: Ylva Ekström</p><p>Course: Media and Communication Studies C</p><p>Period: Fall 2007</p><p>University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.</p><p>Purpose/Aim: The aim is to study how people construct their own identities today. I want to understand and study how such a central thing as identity is being constructed, in a place which offers members to freely present themselves, the community Facebook.</p><p>Material/Method: Through Internet based interviews and observations I approach the inner worlds of my informants. Using semiotics I can detect underlying meanings. My theoretical base consists of modernist and postmodernist perspectives among others. Gidden’s theory of the self narrative, Butler’s queer theory, the theory of articulation represented by Stuart Hall, Gauntlett’s model of objects and intersectionality represented by Nina Lykke among others.</p><p>Main results: The main result is that people do not actively construct identity in one way on the Internet. They do it in several ways, deliberately and non deliberately. Identity construction today is very fragmented, like the world we live in. People choose their own ways to present themselves, and the ways they do it vary. But people are often aware of the fact that they do present themselves, they’ve just not been reflecting over who they present.</p><p>Key words: Identity, the self, the subject, construction of identity, modernity, postmodernity, Facebook, Giddens, Butler, queer theory, articulation, the model of objects, intersectionality, interviews, observation, semiotics.</p>

This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in the fi eld of data objects' comparison where the objects are described by attributes of fuzzy or heterogeneous (numeric and symbolic) data types. Many real world database systems and applications require information management components that provide support for managing such imperfect and heterogeneous data objects. For example, with new online information made available from various sources, in semi-structured, structured or unstructured representations, new information usage and search algorithms must consider where such data collections may contain objects/records with di fferent types of data: fuzzy, numerical and categorical for the same attributes. New approaches of similarity have been presented in this research to support such data comparison. A generalisation of both geometric and set theoretical similarity models has enabled propose new similarity measures presented in this thesis, to handle the vagueness (fuzzy data type) within data objects. A framework of new and unif ied similarity measures for comparing heterogeneous objects described by numerical, categorical and fuzzy attributes has also been introduced. Examples are used to illustrate, compare and discuss the applications and e fficiency of the proposed approaches to heterogeneous data comparison.

Abstract Title: Who are you? Who am I? – Charades in the mediated world of today. A study of the construction of identity at Facebook. (Vem är du? Vem är jag? – Charader i dagens medierade värld. En studie av identitetskonstruktionen på Facebook.) Number of pages: 58 (66 including enclosures.) Author: Mathilda Wahlund Tutor: Ylva Ekström Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Fall 2007 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University. Purpose/Aim: The aim is to study how people construct their own identities today. I want to understand and study how such a central thing as identity is being constructed, in a place which offers members to freely present themselves, the community Facebook. Material/Method: Through Internet based interviews and observations I approach the inner worlds of my informants. Using semiotics I can detect underlying meanings. My theoretical base consists of modernist and postmodernist perspectives among others. Gidden’s theory of the self narrative, Butler’s queer theory, the theory of articulation represented by Stuart Hall, Gauntlett’s model of objects and intersectionality represented by Nina Lykke among others. Main results: The main result is that people do not actively construct identity in one way on the Internet. They do it in several ways, deliberately and non deliberately. Identity construction today is very fragmented, like the world we live in. People choose their own ways to present themselves, and the ways they do it vary. But people are often aware of the fact that they do present themselves, they’ve just not been reflecting over who they present. Key words: Identity, the self, the subject, construction of identity, modernity, postmodernity, Facebook, Giddens, Butler, queer theory, articulation, the model of objects, intersectionality, interviews, observation, semiotics.