'They should just show their real self, no one is perfect': using collage to explore 10-and 11-year old's identity portrayal to help reframe e-safety

Social media facilitates a digital presentation of self and a curated identity that may differ from real-life portrayals. Being exposed to others ‘highlight reel’ may influence the way we perceive ourselves. Using collage with an unstructured interview, children’s perceptions of how they portray their identity in digital spaces were explored. This paper focuses on an in-depth exploration of three of these collages and demonstrates that identity portrayal may be more complex than an online/offline binary. Findings demonstrate that children need support from practitioners to develop emotional skills to deal with the complexity of their social media use beyond traditional e-safety lessons.