Collapsing occupational identities on social media: new approaches to digital identity management

This study observes social media users who have collapsed digital occupational identities in a professional landscape characterised both by precarity and by the need to find meaning at work. It aims to understand how and why individuals straddling strikingly different work identities decide to make both identities public, sharing context and/or content online in an intentional process described as ‘context collusion’. Towards this, we present five case studies and an autoethnographic conversation that show how the platformisation of working life, coupled with new SM affordances and expectations, can generate identity management challenges that go well beyond ideas of non-consensual or unintentional context collapse or the sanitisation of contrasting but simultaneous identities. These cases illustrate individuals from widely different domains, including some who hold and promote an identity in relation to sex-related work. We do this as a deliberate strategy to highlight similarities between conventional and sexual labour. We found that those who successfully joined their two work identities collapsed not just their contexts but their content as part of their self-presentation, sharing both aspects of their lives publicly but with distinct narratives behind their choice to do so. However, we found a distinct tension between traditional work processes and policies and the needs of those adopting content creation as a side hustle or as a means of promoting other work.