I've been a bad blogger recently, and hardly a functional human being- this state of total liminality is both extraordinarily liberating and incredibly frustrating. I graduate on Sunday. If you would like to experience the fruits of my yearlong labors, I encourage you to check out the electronic version of my thesis, which I plan to add interactive features to in the future (I'm thinking more along the lines of a wiki than this rather average website). If you do read it, drop me a line and let me know what you think! I'm always eager to hear fresh perspectives and related stories.
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Wesleyan University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology.
Based on five years of participant-observation on the social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net, The Virtual Campfire
explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine,
public and private, voyeurism and exhibitionism, the history of media
and our digitized future. Woven throughout are the stories and
experiences of those who engage with these sites regularly and
ritualistically, the generation of "digital natives" whose tales attest
to the often strange and uncomfortable ways online social networking
sites have come to be embedded in the everyday lives of American youth.
I knew the day would come: I've received my first real robot-spam on Facebook just a few minutes ago. Funnily enough, I was just this evening writing about Facebook's slippery history with fucking over it's core users- ever since the News Feed was introduced in the fall of 2006, followed by the site opening its doors to everyone, including third-party developers and advertisers, and of course we can't forget Project Beacon- in my thesis.
The Spam:
Orality and visuality converge and merge into the online medium, reaching simultaneously for both the hearth and the cosmos. This hearth is the realm of the domestic, where we feed our desire for the security of our intimate relationships and the capacity to be our “true self.” At the same time, there is the desire for belonging to the cosmos, the sprawling landscape wherein we accumulate status and perform our identities, which are the products of the various cultural and institutional systems within which we are embedded.
What makes the online medium unique, then, is its capacity to bridge the gap between the realm of the hearth and the realm of the cosmos, reversing what has been called “the disintegation of the public sphere.” However, the transparency and permeability of the online medium renders the private sphere susceptible to public visibility. With the popularization of online communication came an inevitable “moral panic,” inciting both a discourse of fear regarding the transgressive nature of virtual intimacy as well as corporate interest in exploiting the Web for its economic potential. Nevertheless, for the most part the intangible dangers of being held accountable to largely invisible audiences are considered secondary to the convenience of instantaneous access to this public “global village” from the comfort of the home.
This post inspired by:
Over the past few months, I've been discovering ways in which the
dead live on on the Internet. The project was a rather emotional one; I
was besieged by the guilt of voyeurism, morbid late nights spent
transfixed by the raw humanity of it all, and at times so overwhelmed
by the heartbreaking significance of remembrance of the deceased that I
could not hold back tears. What follows are bits and pieces of the
final research paper, entitled Online Social Networks As Vehicles of Individual and Collective Remembrance. The full paper can be found here, if you're interested!
This past winter, my grandmother was
diagnosed with the cancer that led to her eventual death the following
spring. A devoted mother of 14 children, they together grappled with
many difficult spiritual and medical decisions throughout her illness.
One evening, I witnessed firsthand the incredible unity and strength
that comes about in the toughest of life’s challenges, and the capacity
for technology to extend our possibilities. Ten of my aunts and uncles
took part in a conference call to discuss plans and options: my mother,
a nurse, gave medical advice; my uncle Joe, manager of a medicinal
supply company, arranged the delivery of a special bed; my aunt Mary,
who works for an insurance company, discussed insurance options; my
uncle Jack, a devout Christian, had been researching spiritual healing
centers; my grandmother herself interjected often with words of love,
faith, and strength. However, it became apparent to me that some voices
were not being heard, and my father later commented on the high expense
of conference calls. Fueled by a desire to help, I realized that I
could tap into my specific area of expertise, online social media. In a
matter of hours, I set up a public wiki and encouraged my family
members to write in the communal blog, help in the creation of an
extensive address book, and arrange visits on a digital calendar .
The wiki was quickly adopted by a substantial majority of my
family, including the many out-of-town grandchildren. It became a
source of ongoing updates about my grandmother’s condition, and the
calendar proved particularly useful for organizing a continuous stream
of visits and appointments. When she passed away this past spring, my
family continued to regularly update the blog with tales of their daily
struggles, fond memories of the past, inspirational quotes and Biblical
passages. They also posted photographs and videos. The site became a
living memorial in some ways. Fundamentally, however, the wiki remained
a tool for ongoing communication pertaining mostly to present
circumstances, as well as a convenient address and phonebook. For the
past six months, it has been the source of daily updates about my
grandfather and his care, my grandmother’s presence relegated to
archived posts and photo albums. Such a shift exemplifies the need to
move on, to collectively heal through renewed emphasis on what is
happening in the present moment, while also preserving and
commemorating the past.
The Internet is a complex new medium that allows for the intimacy,
interactivity, and convenience of speech as well as the permanency,
permeability, and immateriality of writing. The principal aim of this
project is a phenomenological exploration of the ways in which these
unique facets of the Internet have expanded the process of remembering
the dead. Specifically, I have examined examples of “online shrines” on
the social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net,
positioning them as vehicles for individual and collective remembrance
of the dead. Each of these three sites differs significantly in terms
of demographics, site features, and normative practices, and thus each
will be analyzed in its own section. My analysis of this phenomenon is
supplemented by online news articles, Internet forums, conversations
with my friends, and literature from a variety of disciplines
(philosophy, media studies, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and
cognitive psychology). Furthermore, this analysis incorporates a
variety of perspectives in the aim of providing a more complete
framework for understanding the complexities inherent to new
technologies, which blur pre-existing boundaries of space, time,
privacy, communication, representation, and memory.
The increasing ubiquity of online social networking in the
everyday lives of the youth has resulted in the public archival of
personal information as a normative practice. Despite popular discourse
that perpetuates a distinction between “virtual” cyberspace and “real
life”, it is evident that people are integrating technologies of the
Internet into their lives as extensions of everyday communication and
identity performance. By virtue of its embeddedness in the everyday
interactions of young people, the Internet is in some respects a “cool”
medium (Levinson 2000: 113). To invoke another McLuhanism, “the medium
is the message”- that is, media develop as extensions of ourselves,
shaped by changing cultural conditions that are in turn affected by
these new technologies. In his book discussing the impact of electronic
media on social behavior, Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) writes that “one of
the reasons Americans may no longer seem to ‘know their place’ is that
they no longer have a place in the traditional sense of a set of
behaviors matched to physical locations and the audiences found in them
(7)”. Electronic media have altered our perceptual fields by extending
them beyond the realm of direct, face-to-face interaction. In turn, the
relationship between physical place and our social environment has been
considerably weakened, allowing for the emergence of new pathways and
horizons of experience.
Though death is a universal inevitability of humankind, and though
it may come at any time, it is precisely for these reasons that we go
about our everyday lives without consciously factoring in its imminent
possibility. If we did, we would forever be locked in existential
stasis. To act is to direct oneself toward some future possibility- of
happiness, reward, prestige, love, security, and on and on. Thus, when
we “type ourselves into being” online, we are motivated by such
possibilities and often fail to factor in that we are creating traces
of ourselves that will outlive their creators. However, just as traces
of a deceased individual persist to exist in the remembrances of others
and through objects such as graves and photographs, so too do they
persist in the ethereal realm of the Internet. Like traditional
memorial services, the sites of these traces can serve to connect
previously unaffiliated individuals through their shared grief. The
Internet expands this possibility of connection, for it is in many ways
easier to articulate deeply felt feelings to strangers through the
anonymity, convenience, and immateriality of online communication.
Though it is not particularly pleasant to ponder the traces we leave of
ourselves after death, this project has hopefully illuminated the ways
in which online profiles evolve into ongoing sites of commemoration,
suggesting that we take into consideration how we choose to represent
ourselves through them.
Every so often, I try out little social experiments on sites like MySpace and Facebook. For awhile, my online profile(s) featured a kooky little drawing I'd made, and I continued to consistently update the content with little bits of poetry. While I found the profile picture below to be quite unique and creative, in the interim I received only three friend requests (from musicians) and no messages whatsoever.
Old MySpace Profile Pic
So, the other day, I thought I'd toss things up a bit and post a shot of me from last summer, when I did a couple of photo shoots with nearby Boston photographers:
New MySpace Profile Pic
To my amusement, since I've put up this photo I've received over two dozen friend requests and more than a couple of messages from a combination of interested men, bicurious females, party promoters and sleazy "modeling" agencies.
I think I liked the situation better before... now I just feel like your average MySpace slut. I'll probably be changing my picture soon. Even though the rest of my profile stayed the same, it would seem that, on MySpace at least, your profile pic says it all. And hot chicks reign over actual content, any day of the week.
Come visit me on MySpace, and let me know if you got to the "actual content"!
This redhead is getting pretty pissed off- not only at the increasingly exploitive surveillance of people around the world, but also with widespread apathetic acceptance of blatant privacy violations. Get a grip, people! Stop bitching about spam on MySpace or dysfunctional applications on Facebook and learn a thing or two about user controls! You're not being nearly as victimized as you'd like to believe.
Lesson #1: No, you can't track who views your profile on Facebook. Not even Trakzor will help you- it's just another useless Facebook application. I get a high proportion of hits to my blog, WebnographY, from those seeking to find the answer to this question. The answer is no. The only way you could possibly ever tell was if whoever was reading your profile just happened to have installed the same dumb application. Odds are slim it's someone you were hoping would be "stalking" you... sorry!
... oh, and don't worry- no one can tell you're refreshing their profiles every two minutes unless you click on a Trakzor link.
Lesson #2: Craft a Limited Profile on Facebook, and use it for family members, co-workers, and anyone else you'd prefer not to be exposed to photos of your most recent debacles. A few months ago, my father assured me not to worry about my Facebook, 'cause "there's nothing too bad on there". Turns out my sister had left herself logged into her account on his computer, granting him free reign to scour through the little details of our college lives. Craft a Limited Profile and check "Show Limited Profile" to any Friend Requests from those who are even the least bit untrustworthy, including your little sis.
Lesson #3: Regularly browse through all tagged photos of yourself. This one is really important, especially for all you high school MySpacers who don't see a problem with posting photos of that last kegger. You just don't know if your principal's created an account and is jotting down your names, as my high school principal did before he called a dozen kids into his office. And, though you may be quite proud of your latest nude photo shoot, I assure you that you are being judged. Harshly. At the very least, make such photos "Friends Only" instead of revealing your titties to the world at large!
Unless you're into that sorta thing, you little exhibitionist, you.
Lesson #4: You've got more control than you realize. Tired of reading headlines about high school friends you haven't spoken to in 5 years? You can control what updates are shown to you- all it takes is a bit of fiddling around with settings and preferences. Sick of getting bitten by vampires and having your brains eaten by zombies? Click on the invitation, scroll down the page a bit and click "Block Application" on the right-hand side of the screen. Poof! No more blood/brain loss! On MySpace, you can choose to moderate your comments, meaning that you get to review what's being posted on your profile and accept or decline messages. Friend tagged an embarrassing photo of you? De-tag it. Don't want just anyone to find you? Change your name to an alias.
Lesson #5: Take a note out of Tribe.net’s book: lean on intimately-established networks of trust. Find smaller social networking sites where you can engage in thoughtful discussion about your eclectic interests with those of equal passion and intelligence. Smaller sites ensure you won't get spammed, phished, and friended by the bitch who talked shit about you in high school. Remember, it's up to you to control how you spend your time on the Internet. You can waste it in the underwhelming pursuit of diminishing your self-confidence through comparison to others, or you can engage your mind and creativity by chasing after the most whimsical of fascinations.
Thought I'd keep it short and limit it to 5 tips; please post comments and/or questions below, and I'll address them in a follow-up post!
