Iranian High School Students’ Self-presentation on a National Educational Social Networking Site: A Reciprocation of “Field”, “Habitus”, and “Doxa”

Rapid growth of national and international social networking sites has generated concerns and issues regarding users’ online self-presentation all around the world. Therefore, the present qualitative study seeks to examine the self-disclosure strategies used by Iranian high school students on a national educational social networking site (SNS), called SHAD. For this purpose, a sample of 425 high school students were selected using a random sampling method. The participants’ profile texts expressing themselves on SHAD were collected and analyzed through a thematic coding analysis. Results yielded four overarching themes, including “life management and goal setting”, “religious prayers and beliefs”, “love matters”, and “didactic texts and quotations”. The extracted themes were carefully discussed in line with Bourdieu’s “field”, “habitus”, and “Doxa” notions. Additionally, the findings evidenced that, due to high exposure of modern students to the world culture through the Internet, the “field” through which the students manifested their “habitus”, as situated literacy practices, may be rooted in both the national and international fields. It is evidently clear from the findings that, in order obtain a wider picture of students’ psychological states, incessant investigations into their self-presentation strategies on online spaces are of a high priority for educational psychologists and planners.