Identity negotiation in the context of internet surveillance: A sociolinguistic investigation into transgender people's discourse online.

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My project explores a timely and under-researched aspect of our relationship to technology, using linguistic analysis to examine how identities are constructed in the face of pervasive online surveillance. Despite the communicative opportunities of social media, these platforms also drastically increase the public surveillance of the individuals who use them. For individuals belonging to vulnerable demographic groups, this surveillance can have significant implications for their use of these technologies and how they present themselves online. To explore this, this study will investigate how transgender individuals use language to manage their identity in an online environment, where their ability to vary their self-presentation is complicated by the potential for surveillance by multiple known and unknown entities at any given time (Manokha 2018). This is a phenomenon known as 'context collapse' (Marwick and boyd2011), identified in previous literature as a particular problem for transgender people (Fritz and Gonzales2018; Scheuerman, Branham and Hamdi 2018).