Unlike other spacious settings such as halls or classrooms , social networking provides us with a framework in which written language projects our identities. The relationship between language and identity is a constitutive one. The latter does not represent the former, but constitutes it by "bringing into it life through the process of signification". Not only does language constitute identity, but also form other social practices that contribute to it. So, language as part of the ideological, social forces, the cultural, the political, and the economical are articulated together to form the 'I', 'you', and 'he'.
What makes this articulation vivid and works in this way and not the other is power. And by power here I mean either coercion or hegemony. Well then, it's power that fixes the meaning in this articulation process and render it contingent. Take the white male discourse as an example. It is this discourse that is powerful in the United States and determines the meaning of gender and race and all the other elements. It is this discourse that creates gender bias and discrimination, for example.
We should not also forget that the contingency element on which the powerful discourse is built is "antagonism"- a term used to describe any other discourse that raises up to oppose the controlling one. Antagonism's importance lies in the fact that it can disarticulate and re-articulate the dominant discourse by refixing its meaning. An example of an antagonistic discourse is feminism which appeared to disarticulate and articulate the White male discourse in the US in a historical period. It could oppose the male discourse to fix a new meaning of women.
What does this do with social networking? Social networking such as Twitter and Facebook drives its users to "sustain a narrative about themselves. This includes the capacity to build up a consistent feeling of biographical continuity". The users, then, will fill in their profiles by answering questions such as "what to do?, "how to do?" and "who to be?" Moreover, Facebook and Twitter constitute discourses that are articulated in the same way as it has been mentioned above. Power and antagonism will work jarringly to rearticulate and fix meanings in a contingent way.
