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

-- DanielButrymowicz - 04 Apr 2008

This is a draft. Comments are welcome.

Introduction

The incredibly popularity of social networking websites among young adults can be explained by their utility as a means of publicizing one's leisure activities. Taking as a start Veblen's theory that the durability of economic institutions depends on their ability to facilitate conspicuous consumption, this paper will analyze Facebook.com as an example of how networking sites enable users to make their consumption and leisure activities more conspicuous.

Conspicuous Leisure Among Young Adults

Facebook was originally conceived as a means of allowing college students to network with their peers. It is currently expanding in scope to include older and younger demographics, but the majority of its users are college students and recent graduates. Due to its origins, Facebook is inextricably tied to college, and even at this basic level it is a tool for conspicuous leisure. Veblen viewed education (particularly in the humanities) as evidence of wasted time. In contemporary American society, attending college is generally a mark of pecuniary power. It shows that one's family is able to afford the expensive tuition and moreover that one can afford to forego any significant income for several years. When your information appears to viewers on Facebook, the colleges you have attended are listed directly under your name. Facebook therefore provides a public forum for users to showcase the pecuniary power that inheres in attending college.

However, since most Facebook users (and certainly most college students' peers) are college students themselves, simply attending college is not enough to make a favorable invidious comparison. Further, since college students typically do not have a significant income, the manner of conspicuous consumption employed by the greater society is not entirely applicable to this demographic. College students are generally unable to engage in pecuniary emulation by buying expensive cars or houses, for example. Instead, college students can engage in pecuniary emulation through conspicuous leisure activities. Facebook allows users to "keep up with the Joneses" by keeping a record of the time they waste and the activities on which it is wasted. The website accomplishes this by offering direct opportunities to publicly waste time and also by recording other leisure activities that were not accomplished through the site.

Facebook as Conspicuous Leisure

The first way in which Facebook facilitates conspicuous leisure is directly. The website itself presents numerous opportunities for the public unproductive use of time. When users join the site, they must create a profile that reflects their interests and personality. Users carefully sculpt these profiles and many update them frequently. Simply having a Facebook profile reflects a certain amount of leisure time invested in making and maintaining it. Further, Facebook acts as a messaging device. Importantly, though, Facebook has two messaging options. Users can send private messages, or they can write a message publicly on another user's "wall." The redundancy of the "wall" function highlights its conspicuous leisure value. It allows users to waste time publicly and provides evidence of social status, implying other leisure activities.

Facebook has also recently expanded to include third party "applications," of which there are now over 20,000. These applications allow users to engage in a number of interactive activities through the Facebook site itself. Some allow users to challenge one another in games like chess or Scrabble. Others are longer, multi-person games that involve enlisting your friends to, for example, complete the Oregon Trail or fight in a virtual pirate war. Some applications are more basic, and allow you to create "stickers" or "graffiti" to put on others' profiles. Each of these applications keeps a detailed record of your activities. My Facebook profile, for example, shows my win/loss record in chess, and ranks me against other users. Facebook's value as a vehicle for pecuniary emulation is due in large part to the fact that it publicizes how much time you have spent using it, thus facilitating conspicuous leisure and inviting invidious comparisons with other users.

Facebook as a Marker of Other Leisure

In addition to providing opportunities for direct conspicuous leisure activities, Facebook also provides a public means of recording how users wasted the time they did not spend directly on the site. User profiles list favorite books, movies, TV shows, and music. By listing these items, users attempt to convey an impression of themselves that demonstrates that they have spent their leisure time in ways that highlight their taste. Pecuniary emulation takes the form of having read the right books, listened to the right bands, and generally subscribed to the canons of taste that dominate the user's peer culture. User profiles are meticulously crafted to reflect the proper taste. In this regard, Facebook serves no direct function in enhancing conspicuous leisure beyond the internet. Instead, its value is in its ability to make the user's normal leisure more conspicuous. Social networking sites elevate unproductive activity that would have otherwise gone unnoticed to the status of highly conspicuous leisure.

Facebook also serves as a medium for documenting the leisure time of users more directly. One of the key features of the site is that it allows users to network by adding other users as their "friends." Once friended, a person is not added to your total unless they accept. Each user's profile has a highly visible list of that person's "friends," complete with a numerical tally. Additionally, users can post photo albums on their profile. These photos provide evidence of parties, trips, or other leisure activities. The number of photos a user appears in is displayed prominently in the profile. Since social time is unproductive time, Facebook allows users to make their leisure time more conspicuous by publicly posting a record of it.

Conclusion

Veblen's thesis is that the vitality of economic institutions is a function of their ability to facilitate conspicuous leisure and consumption. Facebook is a near-perfect tool for publicizing leisure. As a result, it is incredibly popular. It has over 65 million users, and the average user spends 2.5 hours per day on the site. It is notable that Facebook itself does not cost users anything. It is therefore not direct pecuniary consumption. Instead, it acts as a surrogate for conspicuous consumption for a particular demographic (young adults, specifically college students). The site allows people without significant pecuniary strength to make direct pecuniary comparisons with their peers in the area of conspicuous leisure. The power to spend money lavishly is replaced with the power to spend time unproductively in ways that conform to accepted canons of taste.

thoughts to add:

Goffman- identity management searching for other users to invidiously compare

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