Blog Post #2: Response to Charli Lee (http://csmt11.posterous.com/blog-post-1-social-media-reflection)

I’m going to join the crowd in responding to Charli’s first post.


Like Jessica said, I immediately related to Charli’s post about her use of social media when I read her anecdote about watching a friend take a “Myspace photo.” This awkward—and quite honestly, universally unflattering—photo phenomenon has always fascinated me, so I decided to take a critical look at it in this post.* After all, you can ask anyone in our generation (assuming they are on our side of the digital divide) what a Myspace photo pose is and they could tell you, so it was definitely a wide-spread trend. However, I’ve yet to find any scholarly investigation and analysis of into how it originated. Who was the first person to do it (will we ever know)? And how did it catch on? I am surprised that there isn’t any more research on these photos, as I think they explain a lot about how Myspace users structured their identities, as well as the sort of “community” it welcomed.

Nancy Baym briefly touched on the importance of images on SNS sites in Personal Connections in the Digital Age, explaining that, “The images we associate with ourselves, including our photographs and avatars, are also important identity cues,” (Baym, 109). However, she only spends one paragraph looking at this identifier, focusing on the choice of Facebook users to typically use pictures of themselves while Last.fm users tend to choose avatars of other images. I think this invites analysis itself—what about an SNS site dictates what sort of image people choose to represent themselves with? Reflecting on my personal profiles, I believe it relates back to a question of formality. For example, I would choose a more professional headshot for my LinkedIn, while my old Xanga avatars were never of myself but of Manolo shoes and pieces from other designers that my 13-year old self couldn’t even pronounce in spoken word. But then—if there was one day to suddenly be a consensus of LinkedIn users to change their professional photos to ones of cute animals, who’s to say I would not go with the digital flow?

And this brings me back to that strange consensus that got all of us to take cringe-worthy pictures as adolescents. Thinking of this in relation to this week’s readings that looked a great deal at the social implications of SNS, I have to wonder if this strange angle was in fact made popular by the “public displays of connection” (boyd, 73). Even before the socially dramatic the days of Myspace’s “Top 8,” boyd examined how friends would analyze their “Friends” by the Friends that appeared on their profiles in her article, “Friends, Friendsters, and Myspace Top 8.” Therefore, I do not think it is a stretch to believe that it would only take a few people—most likely attractive and popular users—to start this trend, with it then snowballing as their Friends (and their Friend’s Friends) saw and attempted to mimic the sort of image that they a group they aspired to be like used.

After awhile, this angle got its name—the “Myspace angle” or “Myspace pic,” which I see as effectively uniting users who chose this sort of image into a community. In the way that Baym discusses the use of shared lingo and acronyms as uniting forces and identifiers of speech communities, I believe there are similarly image communities that users can be broken down into based on the sort of visual representation they choose for themselves—I am pretty confident in believing all of us in this class have Friends who choose “party” photos, relationship photos, or family photos as their profile pictures (Baym, 77).

As the Myspace platform faded into SNS obscurity, the pose—at least from my observance—lost popularity as well. Now done mostly in mocking, I would hypothesize that it was too closely tied to the platform to make the move with users to other sites. Interestingly enough, while Facebook has long passed Myspace in terms of users, hits, and overall popularity, I cannot think of a single specific image type that would be characterized as a “Facebook pose.” In fact, I do not know of a LinkedIn or Google + pose either. It will be interesting to see if there will ever be this sort of relationship between image and platform again, or if it is just another example of the constantly changing social media landscape.

 

* I do want to add a quick disclaimer onto the end of this post that I did not choose Charli’s post based solely on her first paragraph. While that definitely initially caught my attention due to our shared experience, I do think she made many other valid statements that my classmates have addressed in their posts, so I chose to go with this one specific example since it has always been a curiosity of mine!

 

Colleen