Social Media
The term “Social Media,” as explained by The Economist in an article about Facebook, encompasses web applications that allows individuals to create their own pages- filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another.
Facebook: I’ll give some examples of where this social tool is leading, and present some ways for thinking about what kinds of environments these communities can be understood as being, and how the bodies which interact in them shape and are shaped by that environment. This will both parallel and contextualize Second Life, which Ella and Devin will talk about.
Facebook/MySpace/Second Life
“Facebook describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” It is a website directory, online community, social calender, and virtual bulletin board.Each individual has their own profile/id page, on which they select their chosen identity from given choices, and pontificate on their likes, dislikes, favorite books, movies, music, and update a one-line entries about their current state. The user can join groups of others interested in similar things, start a group to meet people with a specific common interest, post photos, videos, and music, play games, and share information with others. The profile/id page has your picture(s), sex, age (birthday), hometown, year of graduation from what college, political and religious views, what gender you are interested in dating, your current relationship status, what sort of interactions you’re looking for with others, education history, and personal interests like favorite activites, music, favorite tv shows, and so on… there is also and an ever-expanding array of what are called “applications” created by anyone (much like how anyone can create products for sale and use in the Second Life world.) A large number of them that I saw are about keeping up with sports teams, finding out what people think of you, flirting, sending virtual hugs, smiles and gifts, while others expand the identification constraints- such as one which addresses gender in particular- creating options both binary and non-binary, for sex, transition status, gender identity, gender presentation, orientation, interested in, title, and pronoun, Another of interest is the Facebook Addicts, which is a satirical quiz for those who feel that they no longer know a world outside Facebook, a potentially logical question when Internet Addiction Disorder, which renders a person incapable of taking care of their material body, is diagnosed in 2% of the world’s population.
Some Stats: There are around 40 million members of Facebook. It is the #1 most accessed site for 18-24 year olds. 60% log on daily, and the average user logs on 6 times per day. 100 million in revenues this year. (The Economist “Book Value; Face Value” Jul 21 2007)
Zuckerberg, the 20 year old creator of Facebook describes it as a “social graph”, a model of nodes and links in which nodes are people and connections are friendships, becoming a powerful mechanism for spreading information” It is specifically a map charting “real and pre-existing connections,” as opposed to the MySpace model where most people don’t actually know each other. (“U.S. News and World Report, Staying True to themselves; Student Facebook profiles, it turns out, match the real thing” Jul 16 2007). Students initially used it as a way to get to know other students in their school or classes before taking courses with them or meeting them at parties. ("One Teenager's Advice To Adults on How to Avoid Being Creepy on Facebook" Computers in Libraries Sep 2007)
Micro-Macro Identities of Social Networks
Identities and cultures of communities differ- There is a macro and microcosm of identity: there is the identity of these social communities as a whole, which is composed of and reflected by the individual identities of their members.
An academic researcher referenced in the Economist argues that Facebook is for “good kids,” It was created by a student of the most prestigious academic institutions in the U.S., was only available at other prestigious Ivy Leage universities, then other colleges, and since last September is open to everyone. While MySpace, originally designed as a self-marketing tool for musicians, is for blue-collar kids, “art fags” “goths” and “gangstas.” (The Economist)
What is this evolving into?
With Facebook, the identification card has merged with the yearbook page, and acts as our avatar in this online community. It has caught up with who we are moment by moment- what we are thinking, how we are feeling, and what aspects of the social media we choose to affiliate with and respond to, intimately affected by and affecting discourse in the network.
With the internet and online communities so new, it makes sense to question what form it is taking and what effects it has on us. How do we envision social-interactions in a virtual world of chaotic interactivity? There is enormous potential for this sort of Profile/id page to affect the way we interact with the web, which is why not only college students are interested in it. These online communities with the personal identification page, double as internet user interfaces, and for the first time is seen as having that potential use in the next advances of email, photo and video sharing- because of Facebook’s enforced limits and aesthetic rigor that are lacking in other online communities like MySpace. It could ultimately act to sort and streamline the endless carvinal of information into aesthetically sleek, clutter-free projections of our identity online, (the Google of people), the ipod of internet identity.
Instead of subjecting us to unlimited venture capitalism, these communities will perhaps be a place where the discourse of knowledge/information is created/reflected and spread through the next step in advances of email, instant messaging applications, universal search, photo and video sharing.
So, if online communities are here to stay, and what we see now is a sort of prototype for what is to come- what does it mean that we are interacting with others as nothing more than an incidental moment in the transmission of code and information,” to quote Paul Gilroy. What do we make of our disembodiment? How does this form of imaging the human body“ represent or violate [it] in its symmetrical, intersubjective, social humanity, in its species being, in its fragile relationship to other fragile bodies…?”(Gilroy 255)
Is the construction of online identity, with all its emphasis on labeling and categorizing somehow different than the construction by which bodies were made meaningful by what Paul Gilroy called “indexing the estrangement from the authentic human body … as color-coded?” Are we carrying glorified Bertillon cards, taking our own mugshots?
It would be wise to look within this new social media for the purpose and techniques of the “dismal order of power and differentiation.” (Gilroy)
Cities-Bodies: What is the construction of the new city and the body of its new cyber-subjects/citizens?
Considering the size of online social communities, we can see them as virtual mega-cities, where inhabitants dwell and navigate around an invisible, ever shifting substrate of social networks, where discourses are circulated, and the individual is an avatar or a facebook/myspace page.
Elizabeth Grosz, in her essay “Space, Time, and Perversion” is a useful tool for thinking about how these bodies and communities/cities are being fashioned so that we might better understand the relations of power, knowledge, discourse, in this not-so metaphoric web. Speaking of real cities, she says that they are "the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power" and “by now the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its takeover and transformation by images, representational systems, the mass media, and the arts- the place where the body is representationally re-explored, transformed, contested, re-inscribed. In turn, the body (as cultural product) transforms, re-inscribes the urban landscape according to its changing (demographic) needs. (Grosz 108)
Also, she asserts that bodies are not culturally pregiven, and there is no natural or perfect environment for the body, so the environments we create cannot alienate them- A reminder to avoid concepts of natural/unnatural.
“There is not a mirroring of nature in artiface, rather a two-way linkage that could be defined as an interface." Of the interface with the computer, she says it will fundamentally transform the ways in which we conceive both of cities and bodies and their interrelations.
One way this is ocurring is that these cybersocieties/cities are incredibly panopticonic- any actions we perform on our pages, writing on other people’s pages, is immediately able to be noticed by a feed to other’s main page, tracking our actions. But then again, this is a trend in the material world as well, as a popular phenomena of people tracking their friends on cell phones.
Some Questions:
As social media becomes more commonplace, what does it mean to be virtually friended by authority figures, your boss or your professor? What stays out of discourse, what is considered private and public?
What kind of culture will these cities foster? How does this virtual world also affect the material world? We are asking a lot of the same questions about virtual worlds as the anti-theatre people in Elizabethan England- does playing at something in imagination make you want to do it in real life?
As human bodies are hooked up to online communities in whatever form, at earlier ages we recognize we are in the midst of a giant social experiment- how does a dependence on virtual human interactions affect social intelligence, capacity for trust, recognition of emotional cues?
How do bonds made with people only known in the imagination affect or replace real relationships? 40% of social community users feel that their online friends are every bit as important to them as their real-life ones. (Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future at USC)
Health, Healing, and Law Enforcement
News reporters and law enforcement are using MySpace as a research tool for stories where they need background on an individual, an example being using it as a resource to determine which gangs control what turf, and what shootings may be based on. This kind of information is not always factual. The real and the unreal is becoming increasingly more complicated. Cyberphycologists use social communities in the form of the Internet game with avatar, to treat Iraq veterans with PTSD or help people to get over phobias- asserting that these environments can be so real that they can modify behavior. (U.S. News and World Report “Alone in A Parallel Life” May 21 2007)
Looking at social media and its potential, we can see our evolving cyborg consciousness as something intimately connected with our real, material bodies, affecting and influencing the methods of socializing in communities.
