Before Social Media

I wonder how the babies of today would react when they're grown up and realise that their entire infancy has been documented and uploaded to the Internet.

Would they feel thankful for the head start given them on their social media footprint in life?

Or, after all that posing, would they consider it normal and not even question it? 

Would they, at school, struggle to comprehend why their own peers don't already have a few hundred photos posted of themselves?

Or would they feel embarrassed, self-conscious and demand that they be deleted?

All this, before they're even eligible for their own social media accounts. 

Public Pottering

It's the new planking/owling/brooming/Gangnam Style/Harlem Shake. Introducing the next big thing in all things viral: Public Pottering. Get on it.

Follow the Facebook page for Public Pottering here.

Love, Noeline

xox

Public, it's the new private.

It's funny how different social media channels can call for different - if not completely opposite levels of humility.

It was probably a sad day when even self-exhibitionists went with the crowd and put their Facebook profiles on private. But these egoists are resilient creatures. They found other ways of thriving.

They began posting risque thumbnails of themselves wearing close to nothing (it's just a bikini for God's sake, the fact that it shows more skin than my everyday underwear is completely beside the point). Next, they put on their humility-hat and began posting status updates complaining about all the creepy guys poking them, sending them messages and trying to add them. Have pity on me, for life is hard being this good looking.

But if you really want to see some guy's six pack, or some girl's cleavage photo-bombing her duckface - and if you want to enjoy these things in somewhat higher definition than what the Facebook thumbnail allows - chances are it's on Instagram for all to see. They will never ask how you found them or who the hell you think you are. Just keep showing them a little #instalove and they'll keep posting, so you can keep stalking. They call it 'following' now.


Keeping it real.

Noeline X

Affordable

There are some people I could never afford to be friends with. They're the kind of girls who flaunt their most recent Louis Vuitton and Chanel purchases. Who buy each other jewelry from Tiffany & Co. Whose problems involve not knowing which colour Prada bag to buy. Friendship groups like these intimidate me. They have photos of them selves in swanky restaurants with equally swanky views. Do they finish their food, I wonder? Do they gossip and talk about clothes and make-up as much as poor people like me think they do? I once had a friend who pissed everyone off by continually asking them to take a photo of her, and another one, and one more. Sometimes she would do the same thing in front of different stupid backgrounds. Like a plant. Sometimes it would be different poses and angles in front of the one stupid background. Well, these girls have so many photos of them selves I wonder if they have a token man-friend always taking the snaps. And does he ever get pissed off like we did? Or do they always just use a camera stand? Although they wouldn't actually use it, would they? Or maybe they do. I also had a friend who, when taking a group shot always shoved her way into the middle. Without fail. In which process certain people ALWAYS end up on the side, sometimes cut out of said picture by said girl who made it her profile picture. But the funniest is when you get two girls who have the same 'side,' as in the side where they insist on standing because their face looks better that way. And then they end up fighting over who gets to pose on their rightful side, saying the other person actually looks fine from the other. And they're pushing each other playfully and they're laughing but all they really want to do is rip each other's hair out.

Ha.

The Facebook Icon From Hell

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Why does the new 'Suggest Friends' icon look like the Shittyrail logo? I almost fogot about the train that got cancelled on me yesterday. Am I going to be forced to relive bad memories everytime I log onto Facebook? JODER! (That's Spanish for...)

Love, Noeline
xox

Good side, bad side

During my time I’ve been fortunate enough to witness the eve of social networking. Despite it or because of it, my generation is considered self-obsessed, fascinated with broadcasting our selves on the Internet. These include our thoughts posted on Facebook or Twitter (of which our updates are probably nowhere as interesting as we think they are), or in the form of photos (of which we probably look nothing like in real life).

Not that it makes our opinions or photographs any less 'authentic,' but I like to think of our self-customised profiles as 2-D versions of the people they represent.

Words on a screen are rarely received in the tone we implied them to be, and photos posted tend to capture people at their most flattering.

A few days ago I was perusing through someone’s photo album on Facebook. After admiring her dress, her new hair-do and nice make-up – I realised that throughout the hundred or so photos in this album, she looked as if she was 'copy-pasted' into every single one. Whether she was in a photo with one other person or ten other people, without fail she was standing on the same side, same angle, same pose, same smile.

And then I remembered the numerous times I’ve posed for group photos, only to have friends fight over which ‘side’ to pose on because it was their most flattering. There will be a quarrel, the winner will make it their profile picture, the loser complies but will later 'untag' them selves from said picture.

According to the website Beauty Tips Online on 'How to be photogenic and look good in pictures,'

Most people have a "good side" and a "bad side"… by taking a close look at yourself in the mirror, you will probably discover that one side looks better. Maybe it's a scar on your face or the way your hair falls. When you learn which side looks better, you can angle yourself so that your best side is prominent. If you're posing for a casual group photo, be the first up there so you can choose your spot. Accentuate your best features and pose your body in such a way to hide your flaws… practice posing in a full-length mirror.

But on a deeper level, extreme levels of such behaviour can lead to issues of self-esteem and disrupt social functioning. A sufferer of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) reveals:

When I turn my head to the left, that side of my face is thinner, smaller, my nose is straight and pointed, my cheeks are sharp, my eyes are on the same level and the proportions look fine. However, when I turn my head to the right, that side of my face is fatter, bigger, my nose is curved and wonky, my cheeks are fat, my eyes are not on the same level, my eyebrows are wonky and the proportions look completely out of place. When I decide to actually go out, I am constantly planning how to position myself so that nobody is viewing my 'ugly' side. I hate photos, but when I do take them it's always of my good side. The other side looks like a different, uglier person. When people are on that 'ugly' side, I feel extremely self-conscious and avoid looking at them. I hate it so much. It's gotten to a point where I’ve missed 50% of school because I hate being on that hideous side where everyone can observe and see how different it is from my prettier side.
(Source: PsychForums)

It’s no wonder that symptoms of BDD appear during adolescence, when people start to become critical of their appearance. In the pictures we post of ourselves online we see the convergence of two inner conflicts: the pressure to participate in social networking and the pressure to look good.

Love, Noeline
xox

Are you going to Kate’s?

Missed out on Corey Delaney’s big bash? Redeem your social status by attending – or should I say, gatecrashing Kate Miller’s birthday party.

Privacy settings for the Facebook event were ‘accidentally’ left public instead of private, enabling guests to bring friends to Kate’s small Adelaide apartment.

At the time of writing this entry, there were 75, 014 attendees.

The brainchild of online prankster David Thorne, Kate’s birthday party is a political stunt against Facebook’s privacy settings.

He linked his twitter followers with the event and told them to “hit attend… and give the host an aneurysm.”

“While the entire birthday party event was a hoax, it illustrates the risks posed by failing to double-check privacy settings on Facebook,” he says.

Like one big inside joke between Facebook users, there are over 500 Facebook pages such as ‘A380 to get to Kate's Party,’ ‘I can't decide what to wear to Kate's party,’ ‘But Mum EVERYONE Is Going To Kate's Party,’ ‘Getting naked and holding glow sticks at Kate's party’ and ‘Which Turban should I wear to Kate's party?’

The Kate’s Party National Tour is inviting people party for real in their state’s capital city. They are also selling ‘I went to Kate’s party’ t-shirts for those who don’t know what to wear.

Here’s to David Thorne - viral genius.

Love, Noeline
xox

There in person, not in spirit.

Last week I went to a concert. The girl in front of me spent the best part of the show with her head down to her digital camera, zooming in and out of numerous luvos taken before she left home.

It reminded me of the time a bunch of friends and I went out, and instead of hanging out with the rest of us, a couple spent most of the time logging into Facebook every five minutes, looking at pictures of people they barely even knew. The funny thing is they actually updated their status about how much ‘fun’ they were having. Righto...

Which makes me wonder, when people change their status to express how they’re having the time of their lives at this or that festival, this or that party, this or that dinner – are they really just ignoring their friends to update their acquaintances?

Like when people have a photo album dedicated to the attendance of a particular concert, and all there is are 187 luvos taken before the actual thing.

And what about people with albums titled this or that birthday party and all they have to show for it are 981 photos that all look the same – photos of themselves and a few others in front of a drive way when the real party was going on inside.

Or when people pay hundreds of dollars in tickets and new outfits to go to this or that music festival – and all that’s dished up is 28789473487 pictures spread across numerous albums – pictures taken away from the stage, away from the music they supposedly love.

“The perfect example is people who take millions of travel photos and you wonder whether they saw anything or just took pictures” – Marie Claire magazine

There’s a mentality that pictures and status updates somehow quantify experiences into something greater than the sum of its parts; and that this is further substantiated by the number of comments it can attract.

Without something tangible to publish in the online world, how many people know I went out to dinner with my old work mates, that afterwards we had ice cream and girly chats over a harbour view? How many people know I went out with my new work mates, that we had a barbeque and went bush walking afterwards? You wont know about it through Facebook, but I sure had fun.

There’s a certain point where technology stops recording precious moments and replaces them instead. A lot of people are guilty of it. The rest are enjoying them selves way too much to prove it to the rest of the world through self-documentation.

Love, Noeline
xox

Photo by Aileen Apostol

Chequebook

The following is an appropriated exceprt from an essay I did last year. I’m not an academic (yet) but it was marked by one or a few, and I got a Distinction if that helps my credibility. Thought I’d share it with you all while Facebook is still timely and hasn’t been usurped by Twitter yet.

“Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life” (Facebook 2008), and then some. You may or may not have noticed the banner ads on the right hand side of your home page. But just how much you’ve been sucked into them might give us an indication of how well Facebook fulfils its purpose as a White Pages for third party businesses – a database of “sixty million active members” (Krivac 2008, p. 41).

From an economic perspective, the pitfalls of broadcast advertising, which saw the wasted energy of companies “pushing their message to consumers who would never buy their product” is alleviated by “niche communities [who] put the consumer at the beginning” (Digital Branding 2008). This is a major theme captured by Hirst and Harrison (2007) who argue that

the commercialisation of the internet in the past fifteen years has also led to a greater corporate reliance in personal data to refine advertising and marketing techniques at the heart of narrowcasting (p. 286).

Facebook achieves this “by collating ever more detailed subscriber profiles… to categorise users, charging premiums for the sale of these groups to advertisers seeking highly specific niche markets” (Murray 2005, p. 424 cited in Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 69).

Facebook's Beacon records the “clickstream” (Hirst 2007, p. 285), or browsing patterns of its members through the use of cookies: “a small, unobtrusive piece of software… used to track preferences when visiting that website… [to construct] a profile of the computer user” (Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 284). Facebook would then advertise similar searches on the ‘News Feed’ of the individual and their network of friends.

On the receiving end, members claim that their personal details were exploited for capitalist gain. For example, Chris Nash reveals that Facebook makes money by “extract[ing] information from people’s private to private communications” (2008, 3:30min)* and sell it to advertisers, as well as businesses for the purpose of screening potential employees. Yet, “the supporters of free-market data-mining argue that they are only trying to satisfy consumer demand” (Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 326).

With legal policies slow to catch up, the government “must be careful that it does not appear to be too hastily doing the bidding of the major commercial players” (Hirst and Harrison 2007, p. 279). But when “personal data become the lawful property of Internet firms, and of their clients” (Castells 2001, p. 174) to ”monopol[ise] control over the information… so that it can tax advertisers wishing to reach these individuals at the highest possible rate” (New Era of Advertising Hinges on the Free Flow of Information 2007) - an ethico-legal paradox becomes apparent.

From personal experience, when I started posting status updates about the large amount of food I ate that day, I was bombarded with weight loss ads such as the ones below.




While posting comments to my friend about the PCD concert, I was quick to receive this.


Oh, and they also know that I love to write.




Don’t believe me? Let me introduce you to my best friend Jeremy. He’s Asian and he likes basketball. Keen to move out of home, he recently searched real estate online. “Bingo!” shouted Facebook.




As can be seen, socialisation within a virtual landscape brings with it issues of ownership, control, ethics, privacy; and the disclosure of consumer buying habits, preferences and personal details. But is the invasion of our privacy a fair price to pay for keeping up with our friends?

I wonder what ad I’ll get next. Anti-spyware software, perhaps? How close do your Facebook ads hit home? Tell us by clicking on the ‘comment’ link below.


SOURCES

2007, ‘New Era of Advertising Hinges on the Free Flow of Information’, Marketing Week, 15 November, p. 22.

2008, Digital Branding: Close friends, New Media Age, London.

Castells, M. 2002, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford, New York.

Hirst, M. and Harrison, J. 2007, Communication and New Media: From Broadcast to Narrowcast, Oxford, Victoria.

Price, J. 2008, Facebook: Making Friends or Making Sales?, Facebook Podcast Part 1: Jenna talks to Chris Nash, Communication and Information Environments, University of Technology, Sydney.

Krivac, T. 2008, ‘Facebook 101: Ten Things You Need to Know About Facebook’, Information Today, Vol. 25 Issue 3, pp. 1-44.