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.]