Identity performance on SNS profiles

The readings on youth and media for this week got me thinking a lot about my MySpace days. I made my MySpace account in 8th grade and used it pretty regularly until I got a Facebook during my junior year of high school. Looking back, I realize that, for me, identity performance on MySpace seemed way more important to me than it ever did on Facebook. I changed my MySpace profile CONSTANTLY, always reflecting what I thought were my most "valuable" tastes, that is, the ones I felt my friends would think were cool/funny/etc. I think I probably updated my "About Me" every week, playing around with the words to make myself sound witty and probably a lot more interesting than I actually was. I think what I liked most about my MySpace profile was how free you were to essentially do whatever you wanted with it (as many of the authors for this week discussed, MySpace had the HTML loophole that many users took advantage of through copy-paste codes from 'helper sites', which I used ALL the time). I didn't really feel limited by this structure; I could type in anything I wanted, add pictures and videos, and tweak it until it was "just right"...at least until the next time I wanted to change it.

As I got older and switched completely over to Facebook, I noticed that my tastes solidified, as did my confidence in who I was. Maybe it was just a function of my age at the time I started using Facebook, or maybe it was because I thought Facebook was more mature (at the time they had just started letting high schoolers join), but I don't think I ever felt the same pressure to make sure the tastes I presented there were 'acceptable' to my friends. Of course, I don't list EVERY band I listen to or EVERY movie/TV show I like, but the ones I do have on my profile are the ones that are genuinely my favorites, regardless of what my friends list on theirs. As Emma mentioned in her post, Facebook is somewhat limiting in the way you can represent tastes: there's no way to differentiate between what you absolutely love and what you sort-of-like-sometimes, unless you explicitly state it in your 'About Me' section. But I think it's because of this format that I, and perhaps others, only list the things they really like. I don't feel the need to update my profile nearly as often as I did on MySpace, although I will always change it if I start a new job or internship.

It's interesting that new relationships, jobs, schools, etc. motivate people to change their online profiles. If you think about it, it's really the same kinds of life changes people have always shared with each other; social networking sites just provide a more efficient, widespread way of doing so. For example, rather than having to call or text all your friends to tell them you started dating someone new (or broke up with someone), you can post it on Facebook where they can all see it and respond if they choose (whether or not they actually DO see it and respond is another issue, though). I think this says a lot about how we perceive identity. Who we are seems to be based on our life situations--where we go to school, where we work, whether or not we have a partner. These are the things that, before social networking sites, we would find out about people after we first met them and got to know them by talking to them. With an SNS profile, someone can learn all of these major things about you at once, sometimes without ever even making contact with you. Listing our tastes adds another dimension to this "all at once" approach: personal likes and dislikes were often secondary things that you could find out after you learned all the 'big' things about someone.

There are, of course, people that don't want to list a lot of personal information and tastes on their profile because they don't want to be judged based on what they list on their Facebook page (as Emma said was the case for her). However, there are many users who do choose to perform identity through SNS's, perhaps because they want people to know up front who they are. I suppose it makes sense in the context of forming real friendships and relationships: you probably don't want to start talking to someone who hates everything you love or vice versa. It has the potential to do a lot of the work for us in weeding out who is compatible and who's not. We should be cautious, though, if this is the approach we choose to take: identity performance is fragile and inexact. People can easily lie about/play up their tastes to make themselves seem more appealing or interesting. Conversely, we could miss out on the opportunity to talk to a lot of truly interesting people just because they don't list a lot of interests on their page. Perhaps this is oversimplifying things, because there a lot of varying reasons why people do or don't list certain things on SNS profiles, but I think this theory could certainly apply to at least some SNS users.

-Nicole @nmf255