Technology Mediated Body:Research On Body-identity In The Era Of Social Beauty

The vigorous development of social media has provided an opportunity for the popularity of self portraits.With the development of digital image technology,people can use digital beauty technology to create and express "my body" freely.All mankind has ushered in a special stage-Beauty social era.Then comes a new understanding of the body,The body is usually viewed as an entity,thus either necessary nor possible to be identified with anything else.Photographs are seen as the representation of the body.However,with the popularity of beauty technology and social media,the relationship between the individuals and their self portraits in social media has been becoming more and more complicated:these self portraits are not only the "representations"but "also eproductions"of the body.And what’s more "these bodies"are seen as the "agents" of the communicators in social media.These "bodies" have challenged the existed view of body as an entity,and that which body was my body is now becoming a crucial problem the communicators must handle with.Through the analysis of how to re-establish and self classify the differences between self and body mediated by technology,this paper further explores the problem of personal body-identity in the era of social beauty.Based on the SIP theory model and ethnography method,this paper collected and observed the daily process of Beauty Society of college students,and put forward a basic model of how communication participants in beauty social era communicate with "my body".This model reveals the personal body identification process based on social system,entangled with technology and interactive.It is found that in the social practice of beauty,the mediating role of technology indirectly reshapes the physical body of individuals,directly reshapes the online social body,and directly or indirectly affects the expression of people’s offline social body.In this process,body-identity is generated by people’s different establishment of different"body"representations.In fact,people’s online-social body,offline-social body and physical body are showing a trend of "identity".