My Consumption is More Conspicuous Than Yours! (Sculpting Identity Through Facebook)

-- DanielButrymowicz - 04 Apr 2008

Comments are welcome.

Preliminary thoughts:

This paper will discuss how online networking sites (specifically facebook) allow people to consciously sculpt their identity and present a vision of who they are to the world. (This is a form of identity management, Goffman). Facebook allows people to create an identity primarily through making their consumption more conspicuous.

This occurs on two levels.

First, using facebook is direct conspicuous consumption because it is a waste of time. Facebook further facilitates the unproductive use of time through "applications" that allow you to do everything from hatch and raise a baby dinosaur to play scrabble against your friends. (Facebook tracks and displays the health of your Triceratops and your win/loss record in scrabble). In sum, Facebook both allows you to waste time and shows all of your friends exactly how much time you've wasted.

Second, facebook allows you to publicly show how you have wasted the time you did not waste directly on facebook. Participants list books they've read, movies they've seen, and the activities they are involved with. They can post photo albums of trips they've taken or events they've gone to. And, of course, the hallmark of the site is that it keeps a direct numerical tally of how many friends you have made (evidence of time spent in social settings). Further, the most public information on facebook is what schools you are affiliated with. Since, Veblen argues, education is a huge outlet for conspicuous leisure, the basic premise of facebook is one of making your leisure more conspicuous.

The key feature of facebook is that it is highly public. As Veblen describes, conspicuous leisure gave way to conspicuous consumption at least partially because consumption is a more visible sign of pecuniary strength. Facebook makes conspicuous leisure more practical because it provides a venue for publicly advertising your leisure activities in addition to being itself a mechanism for the conspicuous waste of time.

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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