Author Archives: Mimi Nichter

I am a professor emerita at the University of Arizona, School of Anthropology. My books include A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus (with Nicole Taylor), Lighting Up: The Rise of Social Smoking at Colleges, and Fat Talk: What Girls & their Parents Say about Dieting.
Cover image of the book, A Filtered Life. The cover consists of a block of blue on top, with white text. The text reads, from top to bottom, "Nicole Taylor and Mimi Nichter" (author names), and "A Filtered Life: Social Media On A College Campus" (title of the book). Below the blue block is an image of several young people of different races and genders pouting. The front of the image contains a camera that is posed to take a photograph of the young people pouting.

Digital Multiples and Social Media

In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to explore the multiple, dynamic expressions of self across online contexts (Nichter and Taylor 2022). This concept emerged from our ethnographic research with more than 100 college students exploring sociality, emotional expression, and online identity work. Our methods for this study included in-depth interviews, focus groups, writing prompts, and long-term participant observation in students’ social media sites. (read more...)