Source-Specific Air Pollution and Risk of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Pooled Cohort Study.

Our paper observes social media (SM) users holding multiple but distinctly different work identities, who have deliberately made both identities public on their SM platforms. We seek to understand how and why these individuals share strikingly different work contexts and/or content online in an intentional process described as ‘context collusion’ by Davis and Jurgenson (), also reflecting Duguay’s () concept of identity modulation. We note the cognitive and emotional labour involved in moderating or managing different work identities, often driven by the need to find meaning at work and to establish the legitimacy of a second career. However, we also note the way that the Human Resources (HR) demands within the more ‘traditional’ workplace sometimes hindered those seeking to adopt content creation as a side hustle or as a means of promoting other work. Through the lenses of platformisation, or “the penetration of the infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life” (Poell et al., :5), and influencer creep (Bishop, ), or the creeping of influencer practices into everyday life, we aim to elicit new ways of thinking about the ways we manage multiple, different versions of self at the intersection of digital labour and identity. To do so, we present five case studies and an autoethnographic conversation, arguing that these new demands born out of the need to constantly engage in SM promotion require new approaches to identity management research, moving beyond the view that individuals with strikingly different professional and/or personal identities will almost inevitably wish to keep these separate. Until recently, the prevailing research assumption was that people sought to avoid ‘context collapse’, or situations where “people, information, and norms from different settings all converge into one context” (Loh & Walsh, :1). Context collapse is a well-researched phenomenon, known to be exacerbated by SM’s lack of spatial, social or temporal boundaries (Kaul & Chaudri, ). In the work context, researchers typically focus on people’s need to retain a strong professional identity, untainted by life outside of the workplace, because context collapse (e.g. following leaked SM posts) can limit employment and promotion opportunities, or even lead to job loss (Robards & Graf, ).