Friend Me? by Caitlin Baggott

The Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities includes a thoughtful essay by Caitlin Baggott about facebook and other social networking sites. A few excerpts:

..... some colleges and universities have begun exploring a class for orientation week that teaches students the skills of meeting strangers. At Lewis & Clark College [in Portland, [dean of students W. Houston Dougharty] says administrators are thinking more intentionally about how orientation programming introduces students to the social skills they need in order to adjust to campus life. "It's easier to shut the door and live on MySpace than to meet new people," he says. "The tether of technology can keep folks from growing--from putting down roots."

... L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, pioneered a new approach to retail sales by creating fanciful window displays in the 1890s before he became a writer. He is widely believed to have conceived of the art of the narrative store window display--transforming department store windows from a perfunctory pile of goods to a compelling dreamscape. By extension, Baum may have created commercial advertising as we know it today, as magical store-window displays evolved into thirty-second television commercials, which were subsequently transformed into Web sites in the late 1990s. With sites like Facebook, millions of Americans now have their own store-window Web pages, where they do more than pile up lists of their "goods"--they create personal advertisements to sell themselves to friends and strangers alike. Social networks like Facebook allow the user to ply the tools of the advertising trade to present their product to the world--and their product is who they are. Everyone is her own agent. But we all know that advertisements aren't reality. So why do we believe that we can use personal marketing on a site like Facebook as a foundation for friendship and community?

Social scientists call the process of determining how people present themselves in the world "impression management," following the mid-twentieth-century work of Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Perhaps taking a cue from Shakespeare's remark that "all the world's a stage," Goffman compared human socializing to theatrical performance. In a recent New York Times article, Stephanie Rosenbloom offers this concern: "Now that first impressions are often made in cyberspace, not face-to-face, people are not only strategizing about how to virtually convey who they are, but also grappling with how to craft an e-version of themselves that appeals to multiple audiences--coworkers, fraternity brothers, Mom and Dad."