Arranged-Marriages Online, Social Network-Style

Several months ago, someone told me about social networking sites that function as matchmaking tools for arranging marriages- a cultural practice that is common for nearly half the world's population, including India, China, and Indonesia, as well as Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. In a fit of brainstorming for my next research project, this conversation came to mind and I quickly discovered Shaadi.com, an Indian version of an online dating site. Curious, I filled out a profile of my own to see what kinds of categories one could choose amongst for self-representation.

Well, first of all, it's clear that most of the profiles on the site are filled out by parents, who are traditionally responsible for the search for and approval of potential husbands and wives. Among the more salient identity markers are Religion/Community (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist, Jewish, "No Religion," "Spiritual- Not Religious," and "Other), Education, Profession, and Lifestyle (diet, smoking and drinking habits). Arranged-Marriages are ideally between two members of the same caste or sect, and Shaadi.com certainly covers the gamut. Potential matches are also frequently judged by education level and profession, as well as the aforementioned "lifestyle habits," which are heavily informed by religious beliefs.

A few other things I learned about while creating a profile on the site:

• The alignment of the stars at one's birth determines if a person is a Manglik, and Shaadi.com inquires as to one is. In Indian astrology, Mangliks are destined for difficulties in marriage. In order to balance out these negative forces, it is often suggested that a Manglik marry another Manglik, based on the idea that two negatives make a positive. Astrology in general is quite important for many Indians, especially Hindus, when it comes to marriage, and Shaadi.com users may incorporate a variety of astrological readings in their profiles.

• Like pretty much every social networking site, one can fill in an open-ended "About Me" box. However, on this site, there is also a significant section called "About My Family." Shaadi.com offers a few pointers for users filling out this section, the first of which suggests describing the family's outlook and approach towards life. Early on in the registration process, one could select whether her "Family Values" are traditional, moderate, or liberal. Clearly, the degree to which one's family embraces more traditional or more liberal attitudes and values has a significant effect on the matrimonial process.

• Admirably, the site also inquires about users' HIV status. Though figures place the percentage of HIV-infected people in India at a seemingly minute 0.36%, with the country's enormous population this amounts to between 2 million and 3.6 million Indians living with HIV. While there is some evidence that the rate of infection is currently declining, likely due to successful prevention and awareness campaigns, there is also plenty of evidence to the contrary. Given the rampant fear and stigmatization of HIV-positive individuals in communities everywhere, marking oneself as HIV-positive on the site likely drastically reduces one's chances at finding a spouse. However, as with both Mangliks and "Special Cases," another profile category wherein one can indicate mental and/or physical handicaps, the site makes finding others who share their "condition" a much easier process in many ways.

This semester, I am taking only one class as I complete my graduate thesis, the last class I will ever take at Wesleyan: Nationalism and the Politics of Gender and Sexuality with Professor Kauanui. Like most of the classes I've taken, I'm to conduct a semester-long research project, giving me the opportunity to conduct another mini-ethnography related to online social networking. As such, I'll be regularly posting my most pertinent and interesting findings. Stay tuned!

Hibernation and the Pursuit of Brilliance

This past month, I've sought to nourish myself through what is, for me, the most difficult period of the year. January. And I made it! I'm okay! And I've written a lot of things.

In fact, I was recently hired to join a team of bloggers, helping to create the "meat" of a pre-beta social networking site, iggli. You can check out my blog here, or by clicking on the title of this post. It's where I've been writing regularly these days. Original writing, at that.

Having shaken myself free from the noxious syndrome of reading "research" and creating headers beneath which I can conveniently categorize the perspectives of others into "anxieties" and "utopias", I have now reached what will be the butter on the bread of my thesis. That is, that which makes the dry foundation delicious. Not that ethnography is ever dry. My first chapters are rife with the stories, anecdotes, personalities, ideas that propelled me to do this research in the first place.

But now, allow me to be indulgent. I embark on a chapter I've hesitantly entitled "A Phenomenological Exploration of Online Social Networking." This is where I tell my own story, where I deeply investigate my own integration of anxieties toward and utopic visions of the Internet and its potentials and failures.

And everything else.

The past week has consisted of moving into a new apartment (where I will no longer bother touchy neighbors with my entirely nocturnal rhythm and proclivity toward human interaction and [god forbid!] music), sleeping 10-12 hours a night, and battling the obvious onset of ill health with my finest vegetarian cooking, isolation, and relaxation.

I sit before the screen now resolved to put forth a testimony founded on inner truths, desires, sadnesses, attempts to bridge the increasing divide I see between individuals and community. The Internet, for me, is the "final frontier" in which we may remake ourselves, and in so doing, contribute to the remaking of this severely damaged world.

Though, as severely damaged as it is, it is because of my overwhelming love of the stories, personalities, and lives of others that I have become so enamored with the potential for anthropological research to promote human understanding, empathy, and that elusive yet all-empowering ultimate pursuit: community, connection, the sense of belonging and the extension of selfhood.

This has been a manifesto.

Intercises of Cyberspace and Subjectivity

It has become clear to me that the value of this ethnography lies not in my description of experiences, but rather in elucidating the myriad shifting possibilities that emerge in the highly intersubjective field of discourses. As my research has deepened, the one thread that ties these discourses together is the pervasive feelings of anxiety evoked by the blurred boundaries between subject and object, voyeur and exhibitionist, human and machine, reality and imagination. All technologies extend the possibilities of humankind, and in turn, they become humanized and embedded in everyday experiences. However, at times technologies may seem alien and incomprehensible, instigating fear and a sense of powerlessness. The sense of agency felt as one “types oneself into being” through the creation of a publicly viewable online profile can quickly be negated by the discovery that this personal freedom comes with the cost of possible persecution by unintended audiences, such as potential employers and legal authorities. What occurs is a split of selfhood, a temporal shift of identity from intentional author to victimized object of the gaze.

Despite the existential anxieties that arise frequently in everyday discourse, many celebrate the Internet for its potential to democratize information. The perceptual difference between the democratization of information and the invasion of personal privacy lies in the degree of power individuals perceive themselves as having over the medium, as well as the extent to which they feel the medium has power over them. A common way of regaining control and agency when confronting one’s own powerlessness is with words and thoughts, projecting apathy or distaste and finding affirmation through others. Feeling a loss of connection, my friend described her adolescent brother as “consumed by MySpace, his gaze never turning from the computer screen”. For her brother, it is likely that MySpace conveniently fulfills his youthful desire to hang out in a space safe, away from the judging gaze of his family. To reject or criticize is to reclaim one’s subjectivity, or at least portray oneself as the author of one’s own meanings.

Years ago, I endeavored to learn Swahili and travel to Zanzibar for fieldwork. As I became engaged with the actual practice of writing ethnography, however, it became clear to me that writing the “other” would always feel somewhat wrong, condescending. When I wrote my first paper on Facebook back in the spring of 2006, I was struck by the way in which my own experiences resonated in my writing, how the words of others challenged and complicated my perspective with layers of meaning. In other words, I realized the ethnographic authority in my own position as a “native” of an emergent “other”. Eventually, the real struggle became that of subverting such a perceived authority in pursuit of deep listening- of practicing empathetic, temporal re-interpretations of my interpretations. It is easy to say in theory, but difficult to show in practice. As such, I have concocted plans for a website that would ideally bring to life the co-constructive nature of this project by enabling further co-authorship in the form of a wiki . Rather than simply purporting a “native” interpretation, such an ethnography incorporates the voices of “other natives” as well as “others”. As for now? I no longer have a working title. That, too, must emerge out of the thematic coalescence of the many stories and experiences that demand still further interpretation.

Facebook is Evil. Whatever.

The following was initially a comment on danah boyd's recent post discussing Facebook's "slippery slope" of betraying its users, most recently with Project Beacon. Please share your thoughts if you have them!

"Trusting Facebook users" are generally older folk- I think they're more open to publicizing their online profiles because they're seeking to make connections, they're gaining from the public exposure and excited by all the novel possibilities. My ethnography of social networking sites primarily re/presents the voices of college students- particularly veteran Facebook users. The site started out as being a great little niche environment, so people could exchange intimate messages and upload photos from that crazy party where everyone was on a ton of drugs and so on. Then it opened up, everyone was pissed, and that's when attitudes toward Facebook started to shift.

Most first-generation Facebookers have some degree of distrust/disgust for the site, often a great deal of it. Yet they continue to use it because it's become so firmly integrated into campus social life- it's a way to easily invite people to parties and share photos from said parties, to visually organize one's social network and keep track of alumni and old high school buddies, to find out the sexuality or relationship status of that boy you've been admiring from afar. It's crucial. If you're not on Facebook, you're going to be somewhat out of the loop.

Such important social practices generally take precedence over the egregious invasions of privacy that most are highly suspicious of. The trend is not abandoning Facebook- it's far too useful. However, the site's reputation is definitely tainted, and some Facebookers are using the site to form or join groups that promote awareness of Facebook's privacy policies and petition for change. Most, however, are simply becoming more savvy and protective of their online personas; it's become increasingly common for me to be unable to access the profiles of those I'm not friends with because of that practice. Others have simply taken to deleting much of their profiles, leaving just an e-mail address, a witty or ironic comment, and maybe a funny picture. There's also a huge trend to apathetically accept that nothing can be done about it, much like how a lot of young people feel about our government.

Again, these are just observations of the changing attitudes among a specific subset of Facebook users. They know what's going on (though I would say that only the Tech-savvy blog-readers have even heard about Project Beacon- but they know their information is being used for capitalist endeavors), they're disgruntled that so much of what they do on Facebook is publicly broadcast and forever archived. Regardless of how they talk about it, however, they're still using it regularly for everyday social practices. For many, it's become as habitual to check Facebook as it is to check e-mail.

This Space is a Place Within Space

I am constantly reworking the whole. Truth be told, things have never been so gooey. I recommend clicking.

Emergence for an Update

The past six weeks have been spent throwing myself into the writing of my thesis. Currently, I have 53 pages of solid writing, and in the process have discovered an emergent structure that belies that which I'd previously been naively imposing on myself. It has become clear to me that I am able to provide a kind of phenomenological perspective that is notably absent from much of the preexisting literature on computer-mediated communication, generally, and online social networks, particularly.

I have found a lot of journalism, a lot of psychology, a lot of sociology, and various intersections of the three. Don't get me wrong, there is some great research out there, but the vast majority is either biased to some degree (not that there is such a thing as being unbiased, but that's a whole other post) or somewhat dehumanizing, Anthropology, in contrast, is the analysis of individual voices and perspectives that make up webs of meaning and power. Humanism and science spring forth and coalesce! But I digress: in tandem with the written thesis, I am also creating a website. A website that is both a blog (this blog) as well as a wiki, so as to better articulate a) my personal ethnographic and research process, and b) the various media sources involved in the construction of my knowledge (images, blogs, videos, online articles, public forums, the sites themselves, etc;).

By the way, if anyone reading this has any career advice, throw me a bone!

Mass Media Belongs to the Masses

The character of mass media has been shifting dramatically over the past century- from the one-directional consumption of television, to the dialogical (yet niche) nature of online bulletin boards, to the enormous multimedia production of today. As the tools of new media increase in accessibility and expand in ubiquity, we find ourselves in conversation with a public audience that is more or less evident.

Knowing who one's audience is can be a tricky process. Blogs, websites, and publicly-accessible online profiles entail invisible publics. The creation of Friend Lists and the implementation of privacy features restricts one's audience and enhances awareness of it. Through the lens of the social graph, we can create categorical definitions of our audiences by labeling clusters of relations.

(From the looks of it, it would appear that my social network revolves around the following sites: Wesleyan, Boston, NY, San Francisco, Washington D.C, and the Northwest US):



There is something intrinsically satisfying in visual representation that text lacks. There are also few things more desirable than that which reflects oneself, however iconically.

TouchGraph, the company behind this Facebook application, says on their website:

"Traditional search engines provide a way to sift through this data. However, the greatest insights can be achieved not by sifting, but by looking at the big picture to see how items are connected."

Just the name of the company- TouchGraph, beckons us outside of the textuality of the Internet (a quality that is becoming progressively less prominent), allowing us to grasp our wider place in the virtual world on a more intuitive level.

Such data also allows us to understand exactly how limited our individual, direct scope actually is. I predict that the practice of mirroring real-life social networks will soon become secondary to the process of producing engaging media- which, as the Internet becomes increasingly searchable, will find its place amongst wider taste fabrics. These "taste fabrics" are constructed through "word of mouth" reconfigured to the modern sense- that is, hyperlinked. In turn we may find ourselves navigating visual representations of the taste fabrics we create through our Google searches, our social networks, and our own content.

Emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth this is what the self-emancipation of our epoch consists of. This "historical mission of installing truth in the world" cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the Council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is possible only where individuals are "directly linked to universal history"; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.
-Guy Debord

Musings on the Big Picture

I have been thinking of online social networks as pertinent examples of a generational trend, marked by the increasing appropriation of the media and proliferation of contextualized interpretations by disparate individuals, connected through shared taste fabrics that are founded, by and large, on mass media. The rise of Web 2.0 signifies a shift toward user-generated content in the form of blogs, photo albums, videos, music, niche communities, message board dialogue, playful interaction, computer media, and creative displays of identity (what I call the "mashup").

The locale of the hearth (that which is safe, secure) has shifted, from the family home theater clustered around the television to a dynamic mirror of ourselves as relational wholes, albeit individually fragmented. We have begun to bridge the gap between producers and consumers of media- increasing interactivity allows for a two-way dialogue as opposed to the directional nature of mass media.

However, all is not oral. New media is rather a hybrid of oral and written language- at once casual yet permanent, private yet public, intimate yet mediated. We are creating the media, but must not forgot the role of the media in inculcating our understandings of reality.

Plaintively Researching

These past few weeks have been a rush of novel experiences, as I reconfigure my identity in an extremely pointed way. I have been meeting so many new people, and first conversations almost inevitably touch upon my research, which is essentially what i do (who i am?) right now.

As a result, I've taken to carrying a digital voice recorder in my pocket. It's mere presence has a similar effect on me as speaking in front of a crowd of people: intense social phobia. I treat the object gingerly, awed by its potential to preserve the situation so very perfectly in a peculiar mode. Tonight, a friend who promotes his tracks on MySpace spoke of Google's vast database of categorized interest nodes, sending advertisements directed uniquely at his individual identity as derived from his web browsing habits. Google's rumored launch to "out-open" Facebook- that is to say, become the next leading online social network, is of particular interest to me, as is the increasing popularity of niche social networking sites, blogospheres, and Second Life.

Survey on Online Social Networking Habits!

I am conducting a short survey for users of Facebook, MySpace, and/or Tribe.net.

Your participation in this survey is entirely voluntary, and you may terminate participation at any time prior to the completion of this survey without penalty. Please understand that the information you provide will be viewed only by the researcher, and that any responses published will not enable identification of me in any way.

Questions and concerns can be directed to Jenny Ryan (researcher) @
jaryan@wesleyan.edu.
Further information and future publications can be found at http://webnography.blogspot.com

I Agree, Continue to Survey!

Changing Attitudes Toward Facebook

As the tech world continues to grow wild for Facebook, the veteran users in my midst- college students- continue to grow indifferent, even annoyed- or so their group discourse would have me believe. "The applications were pretty fun at first," said one energetic, people-loving friend, "I like throwing food at my friends and turning them into zombies... but it got old real fast." "They're stupid, they're annoying, I just really don't care at all anymore," said another friend, who'd spent his past semester abroad, "I mean, I guess it's useful for keeping in touch with people you don't care enough about to e-mail."

"Well, I care so little that I let her," Dave points a finger at his girlfriend, "go in and change my whole profile around. It's ridiculous, and I haven't even changed it back." They giggle for awhile.

"There are some useful applications," I point out.

"Well, there're so many of them, I don't feel like sifting through all of that crap. Facebook's turning into MySpace."

At the same time, I've found that my friends on Facebook continue to be highly active, having become skilled at interacting with the more useful features of the site. 25% of the most recent 50 emails in my inbox are Facebook notifications of some sort- generally, event listings, friend requests, wall messages, and pokes. These are some of the ways in which we attempt to connect to one another through forming and maintaining relationships and collective cohesion, digitally.

My conclusion? It's just not "cool" to like Facebook- one is better off being critical- but many of us depend on it in some way or another as a way of maintaining social bonds. We've grown addicted.

Log the Third

Today, after my sister expressed her love for me on my Facebook wall (as she is wont to do), I recorded my first video wall post. Unfortunately, I'm unable to "repost" the video here, but I will say it was quite simple, and rather successful! Facebook recently implemented a variety of options on what was once a user "wall" constrained to text alone. Now, one can record video, post a link, post a band (one needs to first register their band at ReverbNation and upload a few songs, which can then be posted on one's profile, or linked to on another's wall), send a randomly-generated fortune cookie, give a "zombie hug", send a cookie, give a daisy, or post a popular song (when I clicked on this, there was a search bar, as well as 3 popular songs listed: Avril Lavigne, 50 Cent, and Death Cab for Cutie).

I also spent a solid 15 minutes taking screen captures of my friend's MySpace profile. I made myself stop at 50 shots, that's how long his profile page is. Lots of links, artistic images, poetry, politically-oriented buttons and banners, the usual favorite books and movies and such, a long introduction (that is prefaced with:
"TOTALLY NOT INTERESTED IN THE FOLLOWING:
your band (unless your organic/synthetic spiritual sounds and presentation could totally wow me, DON'T EVEN BOTHER)
Promoters of any kind!(go away)
spiders, crawlers, spammers, etc go away i don't like you!
people...who freak me out. (it's pretty hard to accomplish)

and now! on to the good stuff!"

His comments were nearly as fun to sift through as the profile itself. Beautiful images, replete with some animated sparkles or color shifts, adorned his walls. The requisite "Thanks for the add!" comment was also a strong presence. The majority of the content was "New Age" in nature- faeries, Alex Grey, and my favorite:

Log the Second

I ran across an interesting thread on Tribe.net yesterday entitled "What is Technoshamanism?" You can read it here, but in a nutshell, the respondees described technoshamanism as a means of uniting the past and the present, or the spiritual and the technological. From dancing around a bonfire to the beat of the drums, to dancing all night long to electronic trance music, the end goal is a spiritual connection to the universe that dates back to the beginning of humankind's time on this planet.

I have to simply marvel, at times, how meticulously the system of Facebook is run. Nothing is deleted, all is stored. Upon deleting my Facebook account, I learned that the moment I logged in again, my entire account- the photos, the messages, the wall posts- would be rekindled from my momentary lapse of Facebook identity, as if I had taken a vacation... which, admittedly, I had.

The new frontier for individualism, the virtual frontier, is at this point still an open one. However, as this sphere becomes increasingly dominated by large corporate networks, understanding the illusory nature of agency is critical. John Barlow's Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace has never been more poignant.

Log the First

It is the first night living alone - this one, right now. Telling myself I need to take a break from the carrying, the unpacking, the arranging of my possessions in an aesthetically pleasing manner, I hop onto the internet to check messages. A familiar name pops out at me from a Facebook notification- a dear friend who'd spent the entirety of the past year in Spain. She writes to tell me she'll be at Wesleyan on Tuesday, and I go from alone in the glow of the monitor to basking in the glow of love, instantly.

I click the 'Home' button, and scroll through my News Feed. A tiny heart appears at the bottom of the screen- a man who'd led a Buddhist retreat had a new girlfriend! And they'd hooked up in 2006 and it was "fabulous". This is way better than tabloids, because I actually sorta know this guy. I mean, we're Facebook Friends.

MySpace is plastered with Dane Cook. MySpace is for bros. My 19 year old cousin assaults the ears of visitors to her profile with screamo and concludes her welcome message with "i probably don't like you." All of my friend requests are from electronic musicians. I do enjoy electronic music, by and large. A friend of mine who recently began producing tracks just joined MySpace, and already has over 400 friends. I asked if he'd been spending a lot of time "friending" MySpacers, and he replied, "well, half of them have friended me". His Comments board is plastered with psychedelic images, a few of them animated. There is an image of a woman whose moniker contains the word "suicide," holding a pair of black panties beneath a caption that reads "Thanks for the add! xoxo".

That is all.

On Technoshamans and the Rise of Neotribalism

Asked to attempt a summation of the online social networking community known as tribe.net, I have taken to replying with the single phrase, "technoshamanism". It seems the word has not yet been taken up by many, so I'll attempt a definition here.

(For a little background information, you'd be keen to check out a term project I worked on for my Anthropology of Dance class, entitled "The Trance Dance Experience".)

A technoshaman is one who integrates modern technology into primordial practices in order to induce transcendent experiences. Now, such a description evokes remnants of that anthropological black mark- the noble savage- and thus I proceed with caution, unwilling to romanticize:

Technoshamanism seeks to rediscover the roots of human experience while utilizing modern tools. Such tools can range from repetitive electronic music, to synthetic drugs, to new technologies such as biofeedback. The states thus induced might range from supersensory to meditative. Modern "rave" culture (and I use this term with caution as well, for the rave scene has become inundated by the mainstream, thus necessitating an emergent subculture(s)) incorporates just such tools to achieve just such states, and where site and ideology merge, we have our subculture.

Regardless of terminology, the essence of such subcultures is the pursuit of the collective unconscious, consciously realized and enacted. When I say "neotribal," I refer to the tribal experience as it is recreated in the modern day. Safe spaces are created through collective artistic action; drugs consumed that serve to enhance feelings of empathy, community, clairvoyance, and/or transcendence; music played that serves to enhance said feelings and provide the collective pulse. This occurs with varying degrees of success, depending on whether individuals collaborate effectively to achieve the same goals.

The Internet is, quite naturally, one of those modern technologies that is utilized by technoshamans as a means of tapping into the collective neural network. As it exists apart (or, at the very least, disjointed) from time and space, the shape and texture of the Internet resembles that of technoshamanism itself. That's all I've got for now.

My Dad's Checked Me Out on Facebook, GAH!

It was bound to happen eventually. Last week, I received a Facebook friend request from my dad. When I followed the link, however, the friend request had disappeared. Apparently my father wised up pretty quickly- it was much easier to log into my sister's account (she uses his laptop all the time), and check me out from the inside. Last night, my sister was showing me some pictures on Facebook- we showed one to my dad, who commented, "oh, I've seen those." We looked up, startled. "Oh, what's the matter? There's nothing bad on there," he recovered quickly. We stared at one another for a long minute.

Later that night, relaxing in our nifty new hot tub, I broached the subject once more. "So, I got a friend request from you last week, but you'd disappeared. I guess you caught on to the personal nature of Facebook?" He nodded imperceptibly. "So, tell me if this is what happened- you joined the site, realized you couldn't simply view people's profiles without adding them as friends, and decided to stalk us through Kelly's account instead?" He smiled sheepishly, confirming my suspicions. I felt, and not for the first time, worried and exposed. But only for a moment... with relief I remembered that both my brother and sister have access only to my Limited Profile, which prevents them from viewing my "Friends Only" photo albums. Three cheers for conscientiousness!

Two New Ones: Multiply and Yuwie

A few days ago, at an outdoor psytrance party in Boston, I caught up with a friend I had made at another party- a German cardiac surgeon-in-training. I asked how we could keep in touch, and he responded instantly, "e-mail is best". I agreed, and the next day received an invitation to join the social networking site Multiply. I liked it instantly: utterly content-based, Multiply "is all about user powered, relationship-relevant content. Every post in your news feed is shared and discussed by people you know, either directly or indirectly through friends of friends." Multiple blogs can be uploaded, video and photo archives shared, mp3s uploaded, reviews and events posted, and personal messages sent.

A new SNC startup, Yuwie, pays its users 50 cents for every 1,000 page views. Each time content is uploaded, a message is sent, content is viewed (including pictures) or a friend accepts an invitation to the site, it counts as a page view. I find it a pretty blatant example of the increasing commodification of social life through new technologies. However, it is slightly comforting that at least someone out there is seeking to grant users their rightful profit for the "work" they do to keep the founders of SNCs rich and popular.

Reflections on Methodology

Even the acknowledgment, as requisite as it is in the field of anthropology, of the problematic nature of representing the "other" (ethnocentrism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, etc;) has become tired, stationary, and ultimately beleaguered by jargon. I seek the active creation of an ethnography both by and for the people- accessible as an inspired, collaborative story-telling. Such an endeavor thus expands the reach of information, rather than folding in upon itself in the mobius strip of academia.

Have I simply made a case for irresponsible, decontextualized ethnogaphy? The feminist concern with being "spoken for" by the dominant underlies my desire to closely examine a cultural form I can safely call my own. My autoethnography is, or so I hope, supplemented and lent legitimacy in the sharing of it, and in the incorporation of myriad perspectives.

Your comments would be much appreciated.

My Personal SNC History

I've been a member of MySpace since December 2004 when I was a college sophomore, about a year after the site launched. I was skeptical. Over the past two and a half years I've acquired exactly 75 friends. I rarely searched for people, preferring to accept or (more often) reject friend requests. I emphasize the rejection bit in tandem with the aforementioned skepticism- the vast majority of friend requests I received were from emo boys with bands or men attempting to woo me. MySpace took on an identity, in my mind, of a virtual "meat market". Rather than meat, however, what is being consumed seems to primarily consist of young women, CPU-heavy (not to mention gaudy) profile pages, and a seemingly infinite number of musicians. The friend requests from artists quite frequently piqued my interest, and musicians and bands make up nearly half of my MySpace friends.

I never made much of an effort on MySpace to accumulate friends, and my profile is somewhat "pimped out" only after a friend told me how lame it was. The *real" social networking service, the one all my friends used and that didn't bombard me with crappy music and headache-inducing graphics, was Facebook. Simple, clean, neat- I didn't have to worry that my parents would find me there, and practically everyone I knew at school used it (thus, for instance, it was highly likely I could find not only kids in my classes, but a phone number or screenname if I had a question about a paper). I have 350 friends on Facebook, and nearly every one is someone I've met face to face.

Last summer I lived in Boston, fell in love with psytrance, and discovered a new way in which I could communicate and solidify the casual friendships I made on the dance floor: tribe.net. Though I have a mere 40 friends on Tribe, what matters is not so much my own collection of friends and spiffy personal profile, but rather the groups ("tribes") I'm a part of. The history of tribe.net is imbued with the sounds and styles of neo-hippies, as evidenced by its popularity amongst Burners (those who attend the annual Burning Man gathering) in the San Francisco Bay area. Activity on Tribe is quite unique from most SNCs I've been a member of: when someone adds you as a friend, they almost always include a personal message; I have several friends from around the globe who share things in common with me; each "tribe" consists primarily of topical forums (less a *badge* than a way to actually share information about a subject with others in the know).

I will continue to expand on this internet autobiography as the months progress, there are many good stories I should definitely get written down! To those readers I know are out there: feel free to share your own experiences... no, encouraged!

Sex and Gender Performance on Facebook

It's been difficult to blog recently, difficult to find my own words and articulate my own thoughts amidst this constant flood of information. However, I have been absorbing quite a lot, thanks in large part to my ever-so-useful Google homepage, in which I can organize the well over a dozen RSS feeds I read regularly, my gmail, the livejournals and podcasts of my friends, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and the handful of widgets I find the most useful (such as Google Maps, blog search, Google Docs, wikipedia and YouTube).

I've just returned from yet another venture through the blooming fields of Facebook, having added two more applications:

SGO: Concerns sex and gender orientation. Facebook's options are rather limited, however with the addition of this app one can differentiate between sex and gender, gender identity and gender presentation, as well as specify who one is interested in. I recall a Facebook group that advocated more diverse and politically correct options for sex and gender orientation, as well as allowing users to articulate more than one relationship- these options are now available. For more information, check out the SGO FAQ and the Relationships++ application, which allows one to specify more forms of "Looking For" (such as swinging and polyamory) as well as multiple forms of relationships (such as BFFs, civil unions, and "seeing other people than").

Socialmoth: Users can post anonymous confessions that are read by other users. The most touching or intriguing gain "hearts" that other users give in response. Thus far, I've yet to see anything particularly spicy... most confessions follow along the lines of "I wish he loved me back." or derogatory "flames".

An update on the "Honesty Box" app: Thus far, I've learned two things about myself: I inadvertantly offended someone, who found it best to let me know only in the most aggravatingly anonymous form possible, and that I'm "out of control". Assessment: the inclusion of this app has thus far served only to make me slightly paranoid and quite self-conscious.

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I read a blog post recently regarding MySpace's plan to build and expand MySpace TV, as well as allowing third party applications. Such moves are being made in order to maintain their top social network status amidst the frenzy surrounding YouTube and Facebook. MySpace's reputation for processor-heavy, cluttered profile pages has prompted a growing concern over Facebook's development. Whatevs.