To speak as another

This paper investigates the use of digital impersonations on Facebook and WhatsApp among young people in Ghaziabad, India. It conceptualizes these borrowed identities as “avatars” that allow people to use digital media without claiming authorship. This paper shows how people seamlessly operate multiple digital IDs—their own, their siblings’, parents’, and girlfriends’—masking behind the IDs of their kin and friends by hacking into their accounts or ghost-writing chats with them. These forms of social media use go beyond self-presentation and digital identity formation to show how people misidentify themselves to excavate the feelings and thoughts of intimate others. Such discoveries enable them to register and calibrate their own responses to their intimates’ lives at a time of immense anxiety about growing estrangements from families. The paper shows how digital impersonations help people overcome the anxieties of doubleness and loss sparked by social media.