About half of American teenagers have their own page on a Web site like MySpace or Facebook. These are online social networks where users create a digital collage of photos, text, video, music to say "This is me." Then the profile links to friends' profiles, and that’s the social network.
Making a profile is like creating a personal brand. So what goes into creating and consuming these brands?
A Brand of Me
by Ellen Guettler
It's a humid July afternoon in St. Paul, Minnesota. Laura Rubenstein and her younger brother Dan sink into their living room couch with their laptops. As they wait for their computers to boot up, they start to argue. Dan asks Laura if she knows that doorways are the safest places to be during a storm.
"No, during an earthquake, you dummy," Laura scoffs.
Dan insists the rule holds true for storms too. And they're off-firing retorts back and forth, giggling in spite of themselves. It's as if they're bored and enjoy the playful exercise with one another. Laura bets him $10,000 he's wrong. Dan says doorways must be really important in a straw house, and the argument is over. They're both laughing too hard.
Laura is 20 years old and home from college for the summer. Dan is three years younger. He'll be a high school senior. They both use Facebook, and they're Facebook friends. But they have different ideas of what should be in a profile.
Dan explains that he wants his to be accurate, not too showy. He doesn't put that much thought into his profile.
"Oh please," Laura cuts him off.
She grabs his laptop and starts to read aloud from his page.
"Dan's interests: intentionally mispronouncing words, coming up with pithy one-liners, whistling, adverbs, skeptical on-yu-eye."
Dan looks at her quizzically. Then he starts to laugh.
"Ennui!" He yells as he corrects her pronunciation.
"Whatever," Laura responds as she starts to giggle again. "Shut up."
Laura's profile doesn't reveal as many of her interests as Dan's does. These days she mostly uses Facebook to share photos and keep in touch with friends. But she remembers the day she joined Facebook. It was a rite of passage.
"It's the thing you do when you go to college," Laura says. "When I got to school for orientation everyone gets their email address and everyone went back to their rooms right away and signed up for Facebook. It was kind of the highlight of the day that day, I suppose."
This was back in 2005 when Facebook was only open to college students. You had to have a .edu email address to make a profile. But a lot of the freshmen networked on other sites before they got to campus.
In 2002, the online social network Friendster was the first site to popularize elements such as having a personal profile and being able to see your group of friends. Until then, if people chatted or met online, it was often anonymously. But Friendster's founder recognized that people were ready to be themselves online - that their online world could mirror their offline world. So on Friendster, you could look for friends… or friends-of-friends.
MySpace was launched on the heels of Friendster in 2003. On MySpace you could post music and videos and create your own page design. These features made it the go-to site of bands and music fans. And they, of course, signed up their friends.
So when Laura and her friends got to college, many of them already had profiles on other sites. But they wanted to get on Facebook because it was exclusive to the college world. It wasn't until 2006 that Facebook opened up to everyone.
Meantime, Laura's brother Dan was on MySpace, along with most other kids in his high school. Dan remembers how much he loved posting photos and comments for his friends online.
"It was really exciting," Dan recalls. "I remember no matter where I'd be, anytime I was by a computer, I'd be like, 'Oh, I'm going to go on MySpace! I'm going to see if anyone commented.' And I'd be like, 'Oh my God I have to write back for each one.' I thought it was the coolest thing… I used it really religiously for six or seven months."
After a while some of the novelty wore off. Dan still uses MySpace, but these days Facebook is his social network site of choice. When Facebook opened up to everyone, most of his friends created profiles there, so Dan did too.
Danah Boyd studies how young people use online social networks. She's a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. Boyd explains that kids like Dan and Laura flock to MySpace and Facebook because that's where their friends are.
"By the end of 2005," Boyd says, "You would hear sentiments like, 'If you're not on MySpace you don't exist.'"
Boyd is one of the few experts on social media and teenagers. She created her first Web page as a teenager in 1995, her first blog in 1997. Boyd is barely 30 years old, but she's been studying online communities for nearly a decade.
"When I was growing up the friend groups would gather at the mall," Boyd says. "And the worst was of course being banned, you know, being grounded, not being allowed out. Because all of a sudden you were afraid you didn't exist. You were afraid that your friends would forget you… For today's teens the social space that they all gather is in many ways online, and so the worst thing is to not exist there."
So it's not surprising that the biggest event at Laura's college orientation was being able to sign up for Facebook. Or that Dan couldn't pass by a computer without checking his MySpace.
Dan and Laura are a part of a generation that's used to hanging out online. Their online lives are replete with personal information and minute-by-minute updates on who's doing what. They know more details about more friends than their parents knew about their friends. Their online-assisted friendships aren't deeper, just broader. And they're comfortable with more of themselves being public. For them it's natural to maintain online lives alongside their offline lives.
A First Impression
Three weeks later, Dan is on vacation in Germany. He's traveling with his friend Lily Salvio-Shaker. Lily and Dan met each other when they were high school exchange students in Australia. Dan went home to Minnesota and Lily went home to New Hampshire. But they kept in touch on Facebook, and planned this trip to Germany.
They have their suitcases and Eurail passes, but being out of the country doesn't mean being out of touch. They've asked the German friends they're staying with if they can use their computer. Dan and Lily are keeping in touch with their friends and even their families through Facebook. Lily is about to start her freshman year at the University of Vermont. Facebook is her connection to some crucial information.
"Lily just got her roommate assignment for college," Dan says. "And we're doing the normal thing and spying on her in Facebook."
Dan and Lily start to laugh. They're a little self-conscious about spying on a profile of someone they don't know. But they can't help themselves. Lily's new roommate is Meagan Agoglia. They've found her profile on Facebook. They're not even sure if her name is pronounced "Megan" or "Meegan."
"We just looked at some of her pictures," Dan says.
"What have we decided based on her pictures?" Lily asks. She's eager for Dan's first impression.
Dan starts to list off the facts they've discovered, "She plays rugby," he observes.
They know she likes diplomacy, she has a little brother who appears in a bunch of her photos. Lily's excited to learn that Meagan is actually a sophomore. Lily thinks she'll meet more people that way.
"She's really tall!" Lily adds. Or maybe not. Since she's only seen photos of her new roommate, Lily wonders if Meagan is actually tall, or if she just appears in photos with several short friends. Lily herself is rather petite.
"Click on her [Where-I've-Been] map," Dan says.
"She has been to -- whoa, to a lot of the U.S. France, Germany, England…" Lily reads aloud from Meagan's Where-I've-Been map, an application on Facebook that shows a map of all of the countries a person has lived in or visited.
"Cool!" Dan continues. "And she's lived in - Wow, in Japan and Texas…"
Dan and Lily start reading the list of places Meagan has been. "California, Kansas, Missouri, Georgia, New York…"
They're impressed.
"She's really interesting," Dan exclaims. "We like her now."
Lily has her own Where-I've-Been map on her Facebook, so she's thrilled that she and her new roommate both love to travel.
Then it dawns on Lily that Meagan could be learning about her through Facebook. So she returns to her own profile.
"I'm making sure I look good in every picture I have up," she says. Lily knows she's being a bit silly, but she clicks through her albums anyway, just to be sure.
Dan rolls his eyes, "Oh my God."
Lily and her roommate-to-be, Meagan, are strangers. But just as they'd want to make a good impression on the first day of school, they want to seem likable to each other online.
Researcher Danah Boyd says that when Lily checks to make sure her profile looks good, it's typical of what most people do.
"People do their best to reproduce the physical body in a way that somewhat idealizes their image of it, but by and large [is fairly accurate]," Boyd explains. "So they put up photos to say this is who I am. These little snippets of music, and snippets of video, they will put up all of this information that collectively works as fashion accessories for the online world."
Boyd adds that people generally want to be themselves online; just maybe a little… cooler.
"See me at my most sexy, see me at my most masculine," Boyd explains. "You want to push the boundaries to say this is who I want to be."
But when it comes to young people, most kids don't know who they want to be. They're still testing that out.
"This is the period in which impression management is really learned," says Boyd. "Did I say things in a way that conveyed what I meant to convey? If not, how do I adjust myself to say what I want?"
Boyd adds that kids need to figure out how they come across in order to get by in the real world. "A job interview is all about knowing how to leave the right impression."
And knowing what impression you leave with strangers is different from knowing what people think of you at home. Teens are testing themselves out in public, and that includes the online world. In many ways, physical public places are not so easy for kids these days. Parks and malls have curfews. Kids don't always have transportation. Many teens are just overscheduled.
"Teens are seeking this sort of access to publics," Boyd explains. "And they're being forbidden from them in the physical space. To a certain degree school is a public, right? But it's a public that's very much controlled by adults. The value of social network sites is that the control is not so obvious. And so it feels like some form of freedom amidst this culture where they don't have much freedom."
That's what concerns parents who say there's too much freedom online. Parents fear there aren't enough controls on sites like MySpace and Facebook to protect their children from those who mean them harm. Boyd agrees that kids need to be careful to use online social networks safely. But she argues that kids need to practice their social skills somewhere before they venture out on their own. Online social networks are one of the public spaces where they can do that.
A Second Chance for a First Impression
Three weeks later, Lily is back in the United States after her vacation in Germany with her friend Dan. It's the day freshmen arrive at the University of Vermont. Lily has just walked through the front doors of her dormitory. Parents and kids squeeze past her carrying duffle bags and plastic storage crates. She pauses in the hallway for a moment. Her new roommate Meagan has come down the stairs looking for her. And soon Meagan spots her.
Meagan rushes over to greet Lily. The two girls recognize each other instantly. After finding each other on Facebook, they became official Facebook friends. They've been messaging each other by writing on each others' Facebook walls. They've even talked on the phone. That's when Lily learned that Meagan pronounces her name "Megan." Lily also discovered that they'd be rooming with two other girls, Louise and Kate. Lily promptly "friended" them on Facebook.
Now Meagan and Lily hug and say how nice it is to finally meet in person.
Meagan asks if Lily needs help bringing her stuff up to their room. As she lifts one of Lily's bags, she notices the skateboard propped against it.
"Oh my God, you skateboard?" Meagan exclaims. Their other roommate Louise has a skateboard too.
Lily hadn't mentioned skateboarding among her Facebook interests. She says it's been a while and she's out of practice. It might have seemed like false advertising to claim it as a hobby.
The girls haul Lily's boxes up to their dorm room. The other kids on their floor trickle in and out and help each other with the heaviest loads. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix songs float down the hallway from another open door.
Most of the freshmen have been on Facebook in the days leading up to their arrival. Some of them even recognize each other in the hallways from their profiles. Meagan and Lily agree that they both really resemble their Facebook profiles. They say, no surprises there.
We All Have One
As moving day at the University of Vermont ends and parents go home, the freshmen start to gather the way college freshmen usually do: at a party in someone's dorm room.
This room is fairly typical. It has white walls and a gray linoleum floor. Just one fluorescent light is turned on for better party ambiance. Kids stand in clusters or sit on the floor. They've known each other for mere hours. But they all use Facebook. And they start to compare notes.
"I met my roommates on Facebook," says Kate Resch, a freshman from Minnesota. "But they were different than they seemed on Facebook."
Alec Morrison, from New York, interjects. "You can't really say who you are on Facebook," he says. "I'm going to put my entire personality on a Web page-"
But Dan Yablonsky of New Jersey disagrees. "You get to choose how you want to be portrayed," he says.
"Yeah, but it's just funny, man," Alec replies. "I just want people to think it's funny. It's not who I actually am."
"I dunno," Dan says, "I want mine to be me. And I am a funny guy who likes having fun, likes meeting new people, and I think if you go on my Facebook, I think they kind of get the idea that I'm a good funny guy who likes to meet people."
Erin Morrissey, of Missouri, thinks people shouldn't draw any big conclusions from an online profile.
"No one really looks at a Facebook and says, 'We're done. We're not going to be friends,'" She says. "It's become a really big part of our world just because everyone uses it, but we can't rely on it to be the sole basis of what we judge people on."
They say that the few people they know who don't have profiles reject them in order to make a statement. Not being on Facebook says as much about a person as their profile might. To opt out is to say "no" to the mainstream. The kids in this room don't all agree on how they're using their profiles. But they all have one.
Researcher Danah Boyd says one of the reasons kids flock to online social networks is because they want to be where their friends are. And it's important to make as good an impression online as they'd make in the real world.
"Put on great feathers and [parade] around the digital square," Boyd explains. "Go to the digital street. See and be seen."
So kids who cared about their appearance at the mall will think about the same things online. They'll find that writing a message on Facebook lasts longer than talking to a friend at the mall. And posting a photo on MySpace will call more attention than walking down the street.
As young people are putting more about themselves online than ever before, they say they're okay with being public. They're used to knowing a lot about each other. And it sort of changes how seriously they take each new piece of information. What used to be personal information feels a little more open.
Today's teens are the first generation to design their digital selves alongside their real-life selves. And they're creating a public face. They understand what makes a good brand. Be visible. Be fresh. Have personality. Then message, message, message.
Back to Design of Desire from American RadioWorks.
