Why are we not migratory birds? Even when its grown hostile, home's home.

At face value, danah boyd’s early commentary on class distinctions between Facebook and Myspace from 2007 and her eventual metaphor of white flight in 2009 create a very compelling narrative about what is and isn’t happening on some of our most beloved social networks.  After I had came across her first blog-essay “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” I spread it like gospel, repeating it in a sort of ‘hey look – the internet is as cliquish as real life!’ kind of way. It focused, unlike her latter talk/paper which refines the argument into a jeremiad about the internet failing us as a social equalizer, on dividing users into two more broadly defined groups, “hegemonic teens” and “subaltern teens.” These are terms more likely to be used in the relationship between political economy and culture and I believe create a more compelling argument than he pessimistic claims of white flight.

As though we were talking about migration in real life, it is easier for me to believe that pull-factors of Facebook were a greater motivator for class-conscious teens than the push-factors that made them stop using Myspace. (I think many of us who were savy were also aware that media frenzy over creepy crime on Myspace was overblown.) Look at Facebook’s provenance: nothing is more emblematic of American middle class dream of ascendency than Harvard and the other Ivies. Much of boyd’s argument in 2007 was centered around the culture and aesthetics of Myspace versus Facebook: the first site was either ‘gaudy’ and ‘ugly’ or ‘bling’/’fly’/‘phat’ depending on who one asked, and the other was clean-cut, white and did not allow for user customization.  As I mentioned boyd’s terminology of political economy earlier, I’d like to add another comment on the economics of the situation, also drawing on her apparent technological determinsim. To me, the brash commercialism of Myspace’s user and band pages, adorned with abrasive banner ads (and recently acquired by Newscorp), seemed an antiquated method compared with Facebook which at the time appeared to function purely for socializing functions. Brands had not yet been attracted to the site and been personified like Dr. Zuckerstein’s monster. Although I had never felt a need to join Myspace, like a good determinist, I was more consciously conerned with the site’s design and purpose elements rather than its demographics. (When I would lament the jarring visual and aural nature of the pages, it would usually be those of my peers at my public school, who were mostly of the same race and class.)

To confront boyd’s more recent work head on, did she not in 2008 write that social networks “are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network” (boyd, 2008, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship)? [Props to whoever brought this point up in class last week, by the way.] So why is she so concerned that stratum of society we don’t come in contact with IRL are not part of our social circles online?  I would be curious to see a similar demographic and connections study of social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr that do not rely on reciprocal ties but instead on the unexpected, often serendipitous results of #tag searches. Carefully following searches for a variety of terms, like my neighborhood, my interests or favorite artists have yielded both connections (sometimes only one-way) with a variety of users or at least a number of new perspectives and voices, even if they doesn’t evolve into relationships that rival personal friendships.

Lastly, on the notion of ‘white flight’ or at least aspirational middle-class and upper-class teens leaving Myspace for less grungy/blinged out pastures: Why haven’t the number of push-factors, like the descent of our parents and younger siblings, and brands, and bosses and advertisers on Facebook, combined with near constant changes to the visceral interface and underlying privacy mechanics caused another exodus of plucky users to services like Google+ or Diaspora? I think when Facebook arrived and took dominance, Myspace was still appealing only to a fractured user base. Facebook has a wider appeal and has established a working monopoly of social networking – look at Facebook connect as the go-to system for rapid-networking over new services like Spotify, within which there is room for deviance. Even members of boyd’s subaltern find ways of subverting the system and personalizing the aesthetics and message of their page.

-AK

In an ideal world, my monomedia content describes my identity. I'm tired of listing favorites.

I suppose the place to begin is the big kahuna, Facebook.  When I first joined in May 2006 (I just checked), I wasn’t interested in agonizing over the details of listing my favorite books and movies, instead I quickly tried to populate the space so it wouldn’t look too empty and then I could move on to adding new friends and posting on their wall. After this initial rush subsided, I did go back and take a closer look at what I had listed. At the time, I hadn’t really been cultivating much of an offline persona, I was just another high school sophomore, but I had been discovering lots of esoteric music online, and so alongside The Decemberists and Bob Dylan (everything was alphabetized) I added entries like Muzykoterapia, a Polish jazz-electronica group, and Rodrigo y Gabriela, a flamenco-metal duo who were just emerging. Today, Muzykoterapia (which I found out today literally means “music therapy”) has 523 ‘likes’ and the Mexican guitarists have over 200 thousand.


My understanding of the ‘favorites’ section of the page was that I could click on the my hyperlink text and find all my friends who share the same favorites, and then those in my high school and city networks. In essence, it is still this way, but now the hyperlinks don’t bring the users to each other, but rather to wikipedia-based placeholders or the brands’ self-controlled homepages. Very clever, Mr. Zuckerberg, verrry clever.  Nevertheless, now that this section has been gridded and given images, I find myself being far less selective as to what I “like” and then gets added to my page. Now, even more than when I first joined, so many things on my page that don’t fall neatly into Facebook’s main categories, ‘liked’ photographers, software, web comicists, blogs, vloggers, city institutions and art galleries are all filed way under “other” or “entertainment.”  I’ve tried to flood the page with a wealth of associations which dilute the initial impact of my page, but I feel reflect a more holistic version of my identity, distorted slightly by having to ‘like’ certain pages (and forgetting to ‘unlike’ them) in order to communicate with them. Other ‘interests’ are listed purely because they have a digital home on Facebook and their peers do not. Last note about Facebook: I get flak for waiting to change my profile picture until at least a year has passed. (The current one is from moving-in day, sophomore year.) I’d much prefer that the profile picture was randomized from a group of them, and the user had a static icon. On the other hand, I really enjoy photography and take much pride when a friend makes my photo their 'default.' I wish there was a better way of expressing this or integrating the many hundreds of photos I've uploaded on my profile page without drinking the Timeline koool-aid. Another oddity is that I disable my birth date from being publicly seen until about a week before my birthday. All of the ‘fun’ of that avalanche of wall posts with less of the privacy risk.


In fact, other than some details of my Facebook profile, I have rarely seen the need to update the most artificial ‘about me’ sections of the social media I inhabit.  The profile page for the site I’ve used the longest, Flickr, has hardly been touched since I joined over six years ago. (I’m going to take advantage of this moment to remove “camp counselor” from the occupation field.)  In fact, the only other thing I’ve removed from the page were ‘favorites’ and ‘interests’ after some friends made me an ersatz Myspace page in 8th grade using Flickr’s public information once it was clear that I had no interest in joining that network.  My twitter ‘about me’ has hardly changed either.  On sites like Twitter and Flickr, a majority of my contacts are not IRL friends, and moreover, the sites (Flickr especially) have more material and explicit purpose than Facebook: to share content, but closed class content of 140 characters and photos respectively. And I’d hope that the photos I share shape my identity as a photographer and likewise my tweets as an engaged user.  Compare this to to Facebook’s utopian ‘cradle-to-grave’ locus of your life, as we saw in the fairly creepy F8 (‘fate’) conference video, where content is to be primarily shared with the network and secondarily function as a personal archive. With relatively few IRL contacts, my content on Flickr and Twitter my content is the other way around: first for me, and then for you.

 

-Ari

[And by "You" I mean Tumblr.]