Adolescents’ Intentions of Self-presentation on Social Media

Abstract

With the development of the Internet and the innovation of mobile network technology, the advent of the social network era has broken the time and space constraints in the traditional social mode, changed the traditional social mode, and extended the interpersonal interaction in people's daily life to the virtual space. The difference between the social network and traditional Internet interaction is that it not only allows strangers to meet and communicate with each other, but it also aims to make a virtual social platform to generate a mapping with real-life interpersonal relationships and make this mapping visible. The social network builds an equal, open, and decentralized communication platform for users. Everyone becomes a creator and communicator instead of a passive recipient and provides a platform for each user to present themselves. In this research, in order to study the impacts on adolescents' online self-presentation intentions, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and media use frequency are regarded as independent variables to measure their behavioral intentions. Besides, a questionnaire was conducted randomly in 529 samples from Suzhou and Tianjin, China, of which only 206 samples were about adolescents. Then, the data were analyzed via SPSS. The results show that there is a positive relationship between online self-presentation motive and attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavior control, and media use frequency. What’s more, the other-related areas can testify to these results.