Will Merrin posted a fascinating essay at Media Studies 2.o back in September, which I have only just now got around to reading. He addresses the social networking user through Roger Caillois’s 1935 essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia“. Merrin critiques the social networking profile and points out a beef I’ve had for a while with the proliferation of Facebook and its boring, blue and white layout used for every person on the site:
Once the construction of a personal webpage required some degree of programming expertise. Today the social networking user merely interacts with, manipulates and fills-in pre-programmed templates and applications.
In an interesting twist, especially with the references to Baudrillard, who often points to the importance of symbolic exchange in pre-industrial society in his work, it seems that the personally designed webpage now takes on the aura of artisanship. In effect, opportunities for difference and “individuality” are better able to be expressed through the freedom of basic html design than the restricted and similar nature of the Facebook profile page, which looks the same for everyone and the content of which is dictated by that which is made available to Facebook users.
What one hopes will add to one’s distinction only adds to ones depersonalisation: how many images of friends posing with drinks are there already on Facebook? And there is no hope here of resistance. Even the refusal to post a photo, the use of alternative images or attempts at an artistic subversion of the form merely take their place within a pre-coded representational system as part of the normal range of allowed responses.
Indeed, while many view social networking as liberatory, this essay points out some fairly important reasons why it can also been seen as further disconnecting and “depersonalising” the self from the world.
While I agree with the spirit of what you are trying to get here — how in the name of community (interaction), ease and functionality (stripping the very technical nature of any internation on the web) — sites such as facebook force on its users an aesthetic. But to say that a set of HTMLs cobbled using a WYSIWYG editor/coding is inherently to be valorised over a templated web site is not persuasive. Don’t we see this template effect in every mass produced or mediated product or service?
Facebook has that template because it makes it easier (though I don’t subscribe to it personally) for one to navigate through friends’ information pages. The moment friends’ begin to customise using free facebook applications navigating through their profiles turns into a nightmarish experience. So we see how even controlled customisation is a bit of a communication problem. This of course would be a challenge for the capitalists at facebook who would want a fair degree of user-customisation vs a standard look and feel.
So the issue, in my view is not customised pages vs templates but rather how those come about, the role of the big other (in this case the large corporations that create the products and services). Nobody went to facebook/orkut and asked for the service.
@Kishore - I certainly agree that even using Frontpage or Dreamweaver is yet another level of the “template” in action. What I found interesting was Merrin’s conflation of the hardcoded HTML page with a greater level of individuality. In that analysis, the old-school personal homepage seemingly occupies the position of synthesis in the dialectic of older presentations of the self through print media, and newer presentations through the web. The individual’s labour in coding a page becomes seen as somehow more authentic than the less labour-intensive act of creating a Facebook, Myspace, etc. profile. Of course, this proposition touches on the elitism of actually knowing the coding language and suggests then that the authenticity of one’s web-self is linked to the ability to understand and deploy the technical possibilities of code. Recourse to discourses of technical mastery in this case does indicate that despite the so-called liberatory aspects of online participation, we are still led to deal with perennial issues of power and control.
Which speaks to your point about the “big Other” corporations. Indeed there has been great debate over the involvement of Facebook in surveillance and data mining, most of which raise flags over the sheer amount of personal information users voluntarily put on their profiles and how this can be used for target advertising and the like. It seems to me that there are two related issues here, and that the notion of depersonalisation inheres in both. One is that there is a distinct financial benefit in attracting a great number of users to a social networking site and requiring them to “flatten” our themselves in order to fit with the aesthetics of the site - the limited options make the processes of data gathering for advertising purposes much simpler. Secondly, perhaps the similarity of profiles can lead to an overall user mentality of “We’re all the same here” which greatly assists the advertisers on the site who rely on the sense of belonging that the site espouses to suggest that if one of your “friends” is buying a product, then you might like it too.
Paul: I would suggest the big other should not be read merely as the all-surveying, all-knowing authorities, but rather that the social is brought into fruition by the corporation. So despite claims of agency, interactivity in Web 2.0 people like David Gauntlett (and perhaps even Will Merrin, I don’t know) escape the fact that “to participate” is the superego. As has been demonstrated time and again (Google, Yahoo, BBC in China/Orkut in India), the corporation has collaborated with the other Big Other, the state to control what is defined as participation. In the scheme of this analysis, whether a template or individually designed web pages appear to be clutching at the straws of individual agency. The issue of structure vs agency lies elsewhere.