MySpace and performing identities

Okay, so I think I've passed through all the stages of response to MySpace now and I have an opinion. When you sign up, you list all of the schools that you attended and you are networked with those people. That's a useful starting place, especially in such a youth-oreinted network. I looked up people from my high school and immediately noticed that there were a lot of really young people on the network and a lot fewer people my age and older (still, there were several people I knew who were close to my age). Then I looked up my undergrad university and found a lot of people. I typed in some key words that brought up people I knew and was actually a bit disturbed by the results. As I looked up the people I knew when I was, say, twenty years old, they appeared to be exactly the same as they were then--not much evidence of maturing, "settling down," rethinking priorities, generally growing up. Because I am so aware of the fairly unlimited access to this site, I set up my profile in a way that was really pretty professional. No real personal information, vague updates on my career and family. Then I invited some people to be my "friends." One person whom I hadn't seen since I was an undergrad responded with a friendly but vulgar greeting that is now publicly displayed on my profile page. Less than twenty-four hours and already a dirty message. I would not have been surprised at vulgarity coming from this person when we were in college together, but I was a bit surprised at her public display of it as an adult--a professional--a parent.

This is interesting to me in my thinking on performing identities. This medium is very youthful. Most of the people on it are teenagers and college students. Plus, all of the people that I knew had "Friends" lists composed of people they knew from college and probably had not seen much since. (I'm getting to a point)

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend about using maiden names. If you know someone before she is married, then she gets married and changes her name when you no longer see each other regularly, then you tend to call that person by her maiden name still. I think it's more than just habit--that other person with a different name is not really a part of your world.

I'm also connecting it to an experience I had recently while on the phone with my college roommate. We lived together as undergrads, and we have kept in touch, but we have not really seen each other or been a part of each other's lives in several years. So when I was on the phone and my daughter showed up at my feet calling, "Mommy!" I had a wierd sense of a collision of worlds--I was snapped quickly back from that old college relationship to my present, very different identity.

So, on a social networking platform like MySpace that is connecting people who knew each other "back then" but have no "real life" interaction, I see people behaving in the ways that they would have "back then." There's a sense of returning to past identities and fulfilling past expectations of behavior. I don't feel like I get a sense of who these people are now (I think every word in the last sentence deserves to be in "scare quotes"). Also, because the majority of users are young, they kind of set the standard for how the space is used.

How does the "virtual space" of an eletronic community shape how people interact with each other? This is, of course, the big question that encompasses a whole lot of other questions, but that is what I have taken from my brief activity in MySpace.

Facebook, I think, poses different questions in the same vein. Here are two brief comments on Facebook: The ways that people organize themselves into groups on this site are really hilarious sometimes. Do you know that there is a space on the profile page to put in your dorm and room number? Let's just send an engraved invitation to all potential stalkers.