Strategic use of social media IDs: critical perspectives on identity and interaction

This study attempts to give a review of social media users' choice of a particular name for the sake of signaling identity cues and interaction with the others. The social media names could be classified into different categories such as traditional/cultural anthroponyms, nicknames and fictitious IDs etc. Out of these categories, it is the phenomenon of choice and construction of fictitious social media IDs by Pakistani social media users which has been reviewed and scrutinized in this particular article. This study examined fictitious IDs of Pakistani social media users from Critical Discourse Analysis and System Functional Linguistics perspectives and demonstrates how nationalistic, ethnic and religious identities are negotiated, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed by the social media users through a particular ID choice.