The current situation means that services and sites thought of as culturally significant within mobile digital culture - YouTube or Flickr, for example - can involve the uploading of digital files which are captured on the move, but which may then be posted online through (relatively) fixed-point PCs. And social networking sites such as Facebook might also, similarly, involve the sharing of digital images taken on camera phones or dedicated digital cameras, which may then be uploaded and accessed through a variety of less portable/nomadic PCs. However, it is interrelated to home and work PCs, the rise in digital mobile media has arguably had a major impact on concepts of self-identity for generations of devoted users - not just college students - and it is this issue that I want to zero in on in more detail here. University students may be able to access such sites through fixed-point university networks, but given that Facebook is no longer restricted to those with education-based email addresses, its potential constituency is massive, with users' primary access points now becoming potentially mobile, as well as being based within the home (some workplaces have begun to block access, however, given fears over lost worker productivity).
The site began life as a US phenomenon largely limited to college students, a cultural space which is and was especially liminal, being particularly linked to experiments with identity, and hence to forms of narcissism. For Burgin, the US college system is one which liminally acts between ‘child' and ‘adult' identities, being precisely transitional, and thus combining elements of play, child-like assumed omnipotence and adult responsibility. His perhaps rather overblown conclusion is that the Internet, in sum total, corresponds to this state of playfulness and liminality between reality and fantasy. A more measured conclusion - though even then, one which may be prone to overgeneralization - would be to view the early rise of Facebook as linked to these cultural meanings and processes of transition; adopted by a generation of users placed at similar stages in the life course, collectively on the cusp of cultural categories of child/adult, Facebook would seem to offer the possibility for identity play and experimentation as a potentially narcissistic vehicle for one's visibility to others. And while Facebook has been thought of most centrally, of course, in relation to social networking, what this sometimes misses out is the extent to which Facebook and its ilk, with their ‘union of the immediate and the mediated', place a new-found digital-cultural emphasis on the presentation of self. Such an emphasis typically hinges on, and reinforces, the use of mobile digital media to capture and image moments of self-expression, identity and play.
For example, one has a Facebook Profile picture along with a customizable Profile space where all sorts of applications including ‘virtual bookshelves' and ‘music collections' can be set up. Consumer taste is thus heavily foregrounded; friends can rank and review movies, and gauge their compatibility with others' interests. Self-identity is explicitly made a matter of one's assorted enthusiasms and fandoms. But the self is not just presented through fan-consumer identities; given the centrality of the Profile picture, users tend to update these frequently, and they become a short hand for changing, up-to-the-minute performances of self. As Lisa Gye has argued of personal camera phone use, by ‘reinforcing the intensely personal, camera phones may also participate in this narrow economy of self'. And the Facebook Profile picture seems to form a part of this ‘narrow economy of self'; different subgenres of picture have emerged, ranging from the ‘glamour' shot in which the self is seemingly auto-objectified for others and thought of as a type of ‘model', to the potentially resistant ‘quirky' or non-representational picture where object correlatives or abstract images stand in for the self. Profile pictures have also started to be thought of as corresponding to a type of photographic opportunity while users are on the go or participating in offline social events; for instance, on a summer break at the UK's south coast in 2007, I encountered young holidaymakers who were no longer posing simply for holiday snaps; instead, they were self-reflexively and quite self-consciously ‘taking Facebook Profile pictures' on Brighton Pier.
The fact that Facebook Profile pictures are thought of as constituting a specific genre or mode of photo is evident from the fact that at least some users have championed ‘Anti Profile' pictures of themselves, that is, images which are deliberately and knowingly less than ‘perfected', posed and wholly flattering shots. Mobile digital technologies like personal photography and image-capture may be culturally evolving not just towards the creation of UGC such as ‘reality' footage but also towards altered and increasingly ‘photographic' conceptions of self-image. Digital cameras and camera phones ‘are set to extend our way of looking at the world photographically and in doing so bring changes to how we understand ourselves'. The use of camera phones to generate images that commemorate and testify to one's presence at specific cultural events has also become a significant use of these technologies, and gig-going, for example, has become a massively mediated cultural ritual.
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