Discursive Constructions of Identity and Experience on Social Media

Social media platforms have become important spaces where people narrate the self, negotiate belonging, and make sense of lived experience. In contemporary digital environments, identity is no longer understood as a fixed attribute, but as a fluid and ongoing discursive accomplishment shaped by language, interaction, narrative practice, and platform affordances. Through posts, comments, hashtags, images, short videos, and other forms of mediated expression, users actively construct socially meaningful selves while responding to the norms, expectations, and visibility regimes of online platforms.

This Research Topic examines how identities and experiences are discursively constructed across social media. It is particularly concerned with the ways users mobilize linguistic and narrative resources to produce self-narratives, claim legitimacy, signal affiliation, negotiate stigma, and respond to social expectations in digitally mediated contexts. By foregrounding discourse, interaction, and meaning-making, this collection seeks to deepen understanding of how contemporary social life is shaped through platform-based communication.

The Topic responds to several limitations in existing scholarship. Research on digital identity often emphasizes either macro-level platform structures or broad notions of self-presentation, without sufficiently exploring the discursive, interactional, and narrative complexity of social media communication. At the same time, studies frequently rely on generalized assumptions about authenticity, participation, visibility, and identity performance without paying adequate attention to the cultural, linguistic, and platform-specific conditions under which identities are constructed, recognized, and contested.

This collection aims to bring together research that explores how social media shapes identity construction, everyday experience, and forms of recognition, exclusion, or marginalization across diverse contexts. It is especially interested in how algorithmic visibility, aesthetic presentation, platform vernaculars, interactional norms, and community expectations interact with users’ self-constructions. It also considers how digital communication can both empower and constrain social actors as they navigate unequal access to attention, legitimacy, and voice.

We welcome Original Research, Perspective, and Methods manuscripts that explore the relationship between discourse, culture, identity, and experience on social media. Contributions may adopt qualitative or mixed-methods approaches, including Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, digital ethnography, narrative inquiry, conversation analysis, and related frameworks. Text-based studies, discourse-and-interaction studies, and platform-sensitive research that incorporates visual or other semiotic resources are all welcome.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• identity construction and self-narrative in digital environments
• discourse practices and meaning-making on social media
• platform affordances, algorithmic visibility, and online self-presentation
• digital citizenship, discursive activism, and online publics
• gender, family, care, and emotional labor in social media discourse
• professional identity, aspiration, precarity, and self-branding
• belonging, place-making, mobility, and cultural memory
• digital slang, code-switching, and subcultural affiliation
• online narratives of inequality, stigma, resilience, and mental health
• cross-platform or cross-cultural studies of identity in digital contexts.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: social media, identity construction, discourse, digital communication, narrative, platform governance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.