Myspace for Cultural Research

this is is an essay I wrote for my Youth and Culture class with Montana Miller, it's about myspace functioning as an archive of the vast array of social functions, like finding a mammoths frozen in ice. I find interest in this topic cause I used myspace as a tool to do an ethnographic assignment on the interactions between americans and filipino trangendered people to under stand the construction of US identity through myspace. Sadly, I've seem to lost that essay somewhere.
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Myspace/Facebook Friendship

Youth and Culture

Alex Merced

Comments from Myspace.com and Wall posts at TheFaceBook are a historical archive of friendship, social interaction, and an archive of cultural functions. By archiving all of these things these social network sites digitally created a rolodex of social functions where you can see the most basic and complex of human interaction mapped out like a detailed flow chart. Although sometimes the creditability of comments can be an issue of concern. Understanding the different levels to which these sites function to accomplish the many levels of social interaction is important to understanding the globalization and out sourcing of love and friendship.

Friendship is a key component to what makes myspace and thefacebook so culturally significant in American culture. Let’s take a look at my myspace page (myspace.com/alexmerced or myspace.com/alexmerced2) to demonstrate the function of friendship that myspace facilitates. In one of my image comment where I have my long hair, my friend Rebecca writes a letter of nostalgia. She is remembering the good old times we used to have working at a movie theatre. Rebecca is one of my closest friends but I’m not sure if we would still be if it wasn’t from all the reminiscing over myspace, since I’m bad at keeping in touch with people. With myspace I’ve kept in contact with many of my closer Connecticut friends, or more so they’ve kept in touch with me. This example demonstrates a model of friendship that includes “knowledge and nearness”, using the knowledge of the nostalgia of prior events with the fondness with which it’s recalled it’s apparent that there is a connection of friendship. If we removed the fondness we get a model of “knowledge and remoteness” which is the concept of the stranger which is concept by Simmel that I read about in the article “The Wider Circle of Adolescence” by Peggy Giordano. Being able to recognize friendship and strangers is a one of societies greatest linguistic functions and using these social network sites friendships are visually and linguistically archived to be remembered.

Although we can tell the difference between the friend and the stranger, and recognizing the interactions between the stranger and the user is just as important an interaction to be archived. A friend leaves comments because he’s your friend, but strangers always have ulterior motives and by understanding these motives helps piece together the puzzle of the context this user played in the puzzle of that moment in history. Like on my non-music myspace (alexmerced2) you’ll notice a lot of comments from bands, but these comments are a little more personal than the typical band comments. This could serve as a clue to a more personal role in music that just the listener. If you farther into the comments from all the bands it’s easy to piece together my role as a concert promoter in the local music community. On my personal facebook wall you can see messages to the effect “nice to meet you last night” with which you can extrapolate the newly made relationship between the two individuals; it’s this relationship that makes social interactions with the stranger or acquaintances such a vital part to reading into any myspace or facebook profile.

Although thefacebook and myspace serve for more than contacting friends and strangers but also serves the cultural function of advertising. From the standpoint of a pop culture scholar it’s vital to be able to discern the consumed culture by the masses, and in what context, social networking sites more that sufficiently provide this information. By reading the comments or wall posts on someones profile you can see many advertisements for concerts, events, and products. All this helps to create a image of the moment to help further deconstruct feeling of the time.

Although, while all these things are great tools in studying culture there are many issues of credibility in the comments presented. There are times where I get misleading comments from bands or individuals asking how I’ve been and “long time no talk” that could mislead a scholar to thinking the bond between me and this person is something it is not. Although, deeper investigation into the archive of social networking will usually help clear these kind of issues. This is where it really becomes apparent the level this archive of society is at where you can trace back contact between two individuals to the point where you can make fairly accurate assumptions about their relationship to each other.

Social Networking sites provide an archive of friendship, social interactions, and cultural functions the likes of which never been seen. While many liken these sites to years book the currentness and relativity of these sites put them in a category of there own. While a superficial analysis may prove for some assumptions that’ll lack credibility he resources are there to make educated assumptions about the relation between many of the actors in performance of life and identity. The discourse of identity and representation will never be the same again.