UNMASKING THE ‘INTERNET ACTION STAR’: A STUDY ON RAMON BAUTISTA’S FAMOUS ONLINE IDENTITY
UNMASKING THE ‘INTERNET ACTION STAR’: A STUDY ON RAMON BAUTISTA’S FAMOUS ONLINE IDENTITY
This study aims to create a holistic picture of Ramon Bautista’s famous online identity as an ‘Internet Action Star’. Since Ramon Bautista uses his given name and discloses many details about him in the offline world then it was an assumption of this study that his offline and online self would be very similar. Guided by Hecht et al’s (2005) Communication Theory of Identity which states that identity is fluid and has four layers, namely, Personal, Enacted, Relational and Group, the researcher then employed the qualitative approach and utilized the interview as the primary means of data generation to look for these layers. Further analysis was conducted on Bautista’s Twitter posts and his famous video series titled Tales from The Friendzone to delve deeper into the identity he portrays through his Twitter posts and videos. The researcher presents that in the creation of Bautista’s famous online identity there exists what Hecht et al call as ‘identity negotiation’ where the layers of his identity contradicted and matched each other to achieve the popular ‘Internet Action Star’ persona. There were three significant negotiations; first is between Bautista’s offline and online self, between him and his fans and between his Twitter post and video series. The researcher concludes that his famous online identity is both an imagined persona created by Ramon Bautista and his fans, as well as an extension of the real Ramon Bautista.