According to George Mead our actual self or the identity we have is the balance of I and me, where Me is how we believe the society sees us and is the product  of what we learn through interactions with others, while I is our own identity stepping in and is our personal response to what society thinks. As stated by self Schlenker; Stryker & Burke, identity is often conceptualized as social roles, helping to explain how social positionality influences one’s sense of self.

Also the emergence of self and identity depends upon the interaction between the person and his or her social environment through communication or language where the person realizes his or her ability to have his or her own thoughts. There is no “mind or thought without language;” and language “is only a development and product of social interaction” according to Mead. For Collier (1988, 1997, 1998; Collier & Thomas, 1988), identity is co-created in relationships to others and emergent in communication. According to the communication theory of identity, a person’s identity is constructed in the process of interacting and communicating with others. It is constructed in and through language, and communication define our identity both directly and indirectly. Also we employ linguistic codes, such as naming and kinship terminologies to describe and assign characteristics to ourselves, others, and groups of people. Example is how i define myself as a daughter to my parents and a sister to my sibling.

The layered or framed perspective on identity according to Hecht, help us to understand identity as a multifaceted social entity nested in different levels. He identifies four frames of identity: the personal, enacted, relational, and communal. The personal frame concerns our sense of being, and all personal characteristics that help us to make sense of who we are belong to this frame. How we formulate messages to express our identity belongs to the enacted frame, it also covers the performance and outward expressions of our identity. The relational frame explains identity as something that is embedded in our relationships with others and in the communal frame identities are ascribed and avowed to through relationships.

These four frames of identity may be considered independently for analytic purposes but are not really separate from each other. One’s personal identity is infused into one’s enacted and relational identities, as well as communal identities, just as the communal identities are a part of personal, enacted, and relational identities.

An example of this is myself, I think of myself as a lazy dumb person (personal) but I constantly try to get my work done on time and study hard (enacted) because I feel like I have to at least since my parents are working hard to send me to college (relational) and so the people in my community would not consider me a failure.(communal).

According to Jung and Hecht (2004) the four frames of identity are not always consistent with each other but despite this they still work together as parts of identity. The discrepancies between or among them are called identity gaps, an unavoidable result of communication and social relations. As communication is not perfect, people are rarely transparent or perfectly consistent. Thus, when people come together and communication occurs, identity gaps are inevitable.

There are two kinds of gaps, one between the personal and the ascribed relational identities and the other between the personal and the enacted identities. The personal-relational identity gap is discrepancies between how an individual views him/herself and his/her perception of how others view him/her. An individual’s personal identity also can differ from his or her enacted identity. The discrepancies between an individual’s self-views and identities expressed in communication are defined as the personal-enacted identity gap.

In my personal experience I have always thought that I am a dumb and an diffident person, but the people who surrounds me, my very close friends and family thinks that I am the exact opposite of that. I think that it is because I act and speak differently when I am around them.

According to McVittie and McKinlay in order to understand selves in social life we have to look at how it was constructed and negotiated through discourse in interaction with others and in adopting a critical approach we are able to see how people construct themselves in everyday life and how versions of self that they propose are oriented to accomplishing social outcomes. And that we, or the identities we make and how they are taken up by others are on-going projects to be developed as we live our lives as social beings.