Christensen: Social networks help people form identities

Virginia Woolf walked through the streets of London on a winter’s night and wondered about the… Virginia Woolf walked through the streets of London on a winter’s night and wondered about the faces she saw in the crowd. Ezra Pound compared faces at the metro station to petals on a wet, black bough — fleeting, beautiful and delicate. As seen on Facebook, however, the faces in the crowd would be completely different. Selective identity is the new principle by which we present ourselves to the world.

A few weekends ago I saw the documentary “Catfish,” which is mostly about Facebook. Without giving too much of the movie away, I’ll say it’s about the identity people construct on the Internet. We all do it — picking which parts of ourselves we want to present to the world. It’s as simple as choosing to untag an unflattering picture or deleting a status you put up five minutes earlier because you’re afraid it sounded silly.

Professor B.J. Fogg teaches a class on this subject at Stanford University. Fogg’s class discusses one aspect of Facebook at a time, essentially deconstructing Facebook element by element. For instance, the psychology of the profile picture and what it says about identity. Choose not to have a profile picture, and all you get is a question mark — as though you don’t know how to define yourself, or don’t even know why you’re on Facebook in the first place.

Facebook allows us to construct our identity, compiling lists of likes — favorite books, movies, etc. — and, in doing so, puts together approximations of identity. Viewers have one idea of a person who lists “The Life Aquatic” as one of their favorite films and another idea of a person who lists “Maid in Manhattan.” Summarize yourself in musical interests. Pick the pieces for your mosaic.

So we choose to present ourselves to the world in terms of what we think everyone will understand. The boxes of likes use pop culture and the media to articulate identity. It’s like every Facebook profile page is the shortest personal essay in the world. Facebook, above all else, gives us an excuse to talk about ourselves in a way that cannot be conventionally ordained as narcissistic. Take doppelganger week, for example — when else would we get the chance to say which celebrity we think we look like, especially if it’s a hot one — without being called conceited? Every status update is a little statement we make to the world about what we did today, disregarding a conversation’s context. In any other situation, it would be inappropriate to announce: “I don’t like this Girl Talk album as much as the last one,” without a discussion already in progress. But Facebook lets us shout out our opinions without any conversation barriers standing in our way. Context be damned.

I got to thinking about conversations because we talked about Woolf in my Forms of Prose class this week and our interactions with others in daily life. There are two kinds of formulaic exchanges we encounter most frequently: social, such as asking for a coffee at Einstein’s, and phatic, like small talk or waving hello to someone we recognize. Phatic conversation isn’t necessarily meaningful. We don’t always carry “Hello” and “How are you” beyond a level of face-value engagement, but they keep our options open for further interaction in the future.

In this same way, we keep people in our friends list who we don’t necessarily remember all that well, perhaps people we haven’t spoken to in years. On our birthdays, it’s a surprise to see who wishes us well. Facebook takes phatic interaction to cyberspace because we can easily call on those people we engage pleasantries with to become better friends, or to be there if we need something.

We usually don’t look to become better friends with the faces of acquaintances on our news feed, but Facebook lets us know things about them that we wouldn’t otherwise. Instead of being familiar faces in a crowd alone with their thoughts, we can see the experiences and feelings they’ve chosen to share in a one-sentence proclamation on their wall. We can see whom they’re dating and often which parties they’re attending.

What Facebook does is essentially make us all essayists, in the vein of classics like Montaigne and Charles Lamb. After our discussion about conversation, my professor sent out a link to an article on the Paris Review about the unseen chain of influence, leading from the first essayists to modern-day bloggers. The article says the basic appeal of the essay is that a person can write “spontaneously and ramblingly” about his experiences, interests and perceptions, “and the world will love [him] for it.” For better or worse, Facebook makes our Internet identities the essay for the common man, allowing us to tell a variety of acquaintances about whatever happens to catch our eye.

Write Caitlyn at cac141@pitt.edu.