Talking About Talking About Social Networking While Social Networking. And Identity.

Sometime back in 2004, I signed up for a Facebook account. I hadn’t really heard about social networking sites before an old residence hall acquaintance of mine told me that I “had” to sign up. Really, this notion was completely alien to me, and I really didn’t understand the point. I think “keep in touch and meet new people” was the catchphrase. I saw this system as a friend collection service: Facebook seemed to be keeping score. And, for a long while, I had very few “friends.” But for whatever reason, I felt compelled to check up on the page from time to time. The early days of Facebook were pretty low-maintenance. I don’t even remember status updates being a feature.

My first real social act on the network was posting the above profile picture (which is currently on my page, though I’ve changed it over the years). Before media explosions over identity theft via social networking sites or other fear-mongering, I felt uncomfortable about putting a picture of myself online. How could I represent myself with a single picture? It seemed pretentious. However, like anyone else who ends up with friends on Facebook can relate, pressure mounted for me to post a picture of myself. So there it was, about as obscure a popular culture reference as one could imagine: a picture of Balin from the Rankin/Bass produced animated film The Hobbit. Balin has only a few lines of dialogue, but for some reason I related to him better than any of the other Dwarves. Maybe it was the glasses. That and his apparently bad eyesight made him an ironically poor choice for “lookout,” unless he’s as farsighted as I am.



Balin was (and has since been) received with relatively wide acclaim. In recent years, he’s gotten more than one “like”—maybe no small feat considering my somewhat low friend count. At the time, I wondered if people thought he resembled me closely, or if they just liked The Hobbit. Asking other people what other people think about oneself felt infinitely more pretentious than posting the picture in the first place. Posting Balin must surely be illegal, unless it falls under fair use statutes. Vie notes that such questions would be compelling to ask students in the classroom—who owns a Facebook page? (15). More importantly, who’s being represented?
I ask the question because now it seems that on both MySpace (which I also eventually created a profile for—it contains quiz results identifying me with Captain Picard, Hannibal Lecter, Severus Snape, and William Wallace) and Facebook ads are ubiquitous, and the format of both sites trumps the user content. We’re given pretty limited tools with which to express ourselves. Even the names of the sites suggest identity loss. In “Facebook” we’re faceless amongst throngs, or just a face. “MySpace” is patronizing and ironic: it’s not “mine” at all. dana boyd has much to say about identity and social networking, arguing that race and class divisions play a major role in determining who uses Facebook and MySpace. She notes a trend where high school-age online social network users talk about online spaces in terms of vectors, and more specifically, how MySpace has often been characterized as being the online equivalent of ‘the other side of the tracks’ (35). I would be calling down torrents of theoretical criticism were I to simply state that space/place play a role in how humans conceptualize their identities, but I will anyway. Therefore (making a huge leap in logic), online social network users “*place*” their identities. That is, they place their identities on the internet, *and* make them into places where others can visit. Naturally, a web-site can’t contain the whole of a person (and I’d invite even more philosophical abuse were I to attempt defining “identity” here). So, we have to be picky, limited to the confines of what these sites, and our knowledge, allow us to do. And, again, those spaces are highly restrictive and self-promotional. Aren’t all MySpace pages, for example, mirrors of the creator’s page and persona? Maybe that’s not an entirely fair question—all expression is limited by medium—but putting one’s identity into someone else’s hands seems treacherous. Maybe unavoidable, even outside online social networking, but treacherous all the same, and even exacerbated by the somewhat static representations online at any given point.

Take the profile picture I included, for example. Though my profile looks very different from the way it did when I first started using Facebook, and it will again in the future, this picture won’t ever change. Unless somebody decides to use it for a mash-up or alter it using image-editing software, this image will endure. More importantly, the image will endure in the mind’s eye. We can’t keep track of every change on Facebook or MySpace, and most of the changes that take place on people’s profiles aren’t very exciting. Facebook’s newsfeed confirms. The biggest change I’ve made to my account in the past few months has been to remove an old AIM screen name. There’s no internet zeitgeist guiding the world to see our profiles at their masterful (or hapless) peaks. So, again, who is being represented?



Formats aside, maybe this is the wrong question. “Who is this for” might be more interesting. For my part, I can only speak for the page that I’ve constructed, and guess that many others do the same. Right now, Jacob Hughes’s Facebook page is pretty bare, and what’s absent is probably more significant than what’s present. I have my educational info listed under “Bio,” but no quotes or other information. Various relations are listed above, including my brother, sister, and significant other. The list is of course incomplete—I have some other relatives (including my mother) as friends on Facebook, and they don’t appear in this list. Rather, I obliged those people who asked me to list those things. I have displayed my actual hometown, *not* Kennewick or the Tri-Cities proper, but the small area outside the larger cities, declaring not pride but rather the absence of shame. I have a bum email address listed under contact information (it exists, but I *never* check it), indicating nothing. Only seven photos of me, which I will probably shortly un-tag, are currently available under my name. I’ve posted very few pictures of myself online, most obscuring my features, and those have since been deleted. Vincent Price stands in for two profile pics, and Brian Blessed another in addition to Balin. I regard these pictures about as honest and accurate as any that were taken of me and posted online. My only activity/interest listing is Saturn Missile, possibly the most face-melting and famous band in the world. Otherwise, that’s it: a page that’s quasi carefully constructed to avoid garnering attention while grasping for it anyway, hoping that nothing there will damage my reputation or employer credibility. Cheeky, but not as cheeky as it used to be; It’s devoid of political opinions, religious beliefs, and anything else which might indicate I have a perspective. On the other hand, often my wall belies the lack of posted information—I’ll curse and swear, launch politically-motivated tirades, complain about heartburn, and whatever else I feel like publishing via the web, more often than not hoping for some other perspectives on my perspective. How egotistical.

I hate to keep saying this, but I’m not so sure “ego” is represented. Maybe “Jacob’s ego filtered through a particular social networking lens, forwarded with an oddly paranoid sense of who cares about/sees what, and questionable priorities” is more accurate. For instance, if anyone clicks on the “Saturn Missile” link, and should that person linger on the page for more than a moment, they’ll see another side of my possibly inconsistent online representation. Yet, those pages are somehow separate, different spaces of identity within an online place. Therefore, I suppose my page is for all those people who I don’t want looking at it. Lame.