I’m what demographers and Atlantic think-piece writers refer to as a “Late Millennial”, which means that I was born in the early to mid 1990’s (the exact center point of that period, if you’re wondering). Like most of my late millennial peers, I grew up on an Internet far tamer, and more structured, than my older sister and her friends: my first social media profile was MySpace, but proceeded almost immediately after by the staid, self-serious Facebook. And that means, for better or worse, that a lot of my early teenage conversations and thoughts about the world are On The Internet. Indeed, Facebook is so kind as to resurface a daily collection of these posts as “Facebook Memories” - numeric photo albums and notes between friends, digital objects that they hope I’ll consume, and share, in a nostalgic dive into my halcyon days online.
I will never, ever do this, because these are conversations written by thirteen year olds, and never should have been made public in the first place. (I delete a lot of them as they come up, since apparently anyone can turn up President these days.) It’s nothing truly embarrassing or bad, just dumb, early teen stuff, like obvious exaggerations about being “soooo tired from playing my cool new guitar for five entire hours!!!” or the popular boys we’d totally flirted with at the school dance. And then there were the ensuing comment chains: we were all in peak “Random1!” phase, and what is it about being thirteen that inspires such a love of terrible inside jokes?
But as I browse my Facebook Memories, what really stands out to me is that portrait that stands before me is not of me alone. The person that I was on Facebook wouldn’t have existed without the comments, exchanges, and interactions I shared there with my friends. Some are now near-perfect strangers, some are still important parts of my life, but the remains of their presence on that platform are inseparably intertwined with mine. Their lines are indistinguishable parts of the story of my online self. Like a modern-day Lettres de Madame Sevigny, these exchanges weave a narrative about who I was and the thirteen year old personhood I shared with the world. They are, in a sense, my epistolary autobiography.
One of, I think, the interesting things about this was how intoxicating it was at that age to be able to express myself, seemingly without limit, using my “real identity”: the entire appeal of Facebook, as compared to LiveJournal or Myspace or whatever, was that this online profile was undeniably You. And because things were still a little underdeveloped at the time (or developed just about right, IMO), there wasn’t yet any broad, cultural understanding of a “postmodern self” native to different digital platforms: there was no LinkedIn You and Instagram You and Twitter You. The Facebook You was supposed to be the Real You, and that gave the things we did their a weight of validity and authenticity that no other contemporary platform had.
In the early-Internet context, sites like LiveJournal offered freedom of anonymity and self-invention: released from the shackles of their physical being, users were at liberty to embody idealized, fantasy versions of themselves. This was the early miracle of the Internet. The arrival of Facebook, then, was sort of radical for the time. You’d use your real name and a real picture, rather than an avatar. For the first time, Internet users found themselves asked to draw a realistic portrait of themselves. As we’d all soon discover, these digital identities were ultimately just as idealized as their predecessors - perhaps better hidden behind a curtain of artifice upheld by an association with our “real selves.”
This was way too much power in the hands of thirteen year olds: like the next several generations of teenagers to come after us, my friends and I were obsessed with composing, however clumsily, social narratives that would portray us as the people we wanted to be, as the people we saw ourselves becoming - hence all the exaggeration. (Personally, the number of boys I made out with at the big eighth grade dance was exactly zero.)
Yet as fantastical as a lot of those early posts were, their digital remnants at least call back wholesome, gueiless memories of ourselves from very tender time in my teenage life. They’re indistinguishable from the paper notes we passed back and forth in class, stuffed in a drawer somewhere at my mom’s house, or the strips of photobooth portraits that populated my sister’s notebook covers. My generation was among the first to digitize these social experiences, but I’ve found, with the passage of time, that many of the digital objects we created together are nearly as meaningful to me as the physical ones. Somewhere on my dad’s computer, for example, are pages and pages of AIM Logs. Every once in a while I’ll reread them, and it feels deeply intimate and personal - these online exchanges captured two people at their most authentic and candid.
On some level, it’s very normal, like developmentally, for teenage identities to feel closely intertwined. But I remember the extent to which - and this is still true - comments and interactions with friends became a part of the identitary narrative I was telling. Not unlike the way in which “dating the star Quarterback” was once a valuable tool in the construction of a teenage identity, the right person’s comment on your Facebook status was a very public line in a similar, on-going social performance. Because we were interacting with more permanent-feeling “digital objects” we were able to concretize and externalize these narratives in very visible ways.
This fusion of social relationships and personal identity is one of the principles of Belk’s “self-extension” model for understanding the link between what we consume and how we perceive ourselves. We use objects to represent, and to concretize, otherwise abstract or intangible ideas: memories, people, aspects of our identities. Digital objects, it turns out, work in much the same way. Although they’re dematerialized, digital objects offer the same social, identitary “use-value” for those who produce and consume them.
Like regular objects, their “materiality” might have a role in the generation and determination of that meaning. Because digital objects are very often interactive objects, they accrue what theorists refer to as “social metadata” - comments, likes, and other exchanges that modify the social meaning of the original digital object as originally generated. A much more poetic description for these metadatum is “digital patina.” (“The Extended Self in a Digital Age,” Belk 2011). I really love this turn of phrase. I find it beautifully illustrative, a call back to materiality, the way the wear and tear of an old leather jacket might bestow social meaning on its wearer.
This brings us to an important difference between digital objects and physical ones. Not unlike shared ownership of physical objects (sports jerseys, for example), the sharing of digital objects contributes to the creation of an “aggregate identity” for the owners. Perhaps because the boundaries of digital possession are so nebulous, so too are the limits of personal identity. As we share digital objects, we also share in “co-constructed” digital identities: “As such strings of short messages accumulate [...] they become less an expression of one person and more a joint expression of the couple or group that has composed them.” (Ibid, Belk 2011). The formation of this “aggregate sense of self” is referred to by Manghani as a “tender technology of the self.” The very public nature of these digital objects, coupled with an early-Facebook context that positioned our profiles as our “real selves,” makes it little wonder that these early online exchanges held so much identitary power for us.
Interestingly though, these digital memories are also far more moduable than their physical counterparts. Like I said, I often delete the more embarrassing ones as I come across them. I don’t know that it’s all that different than throwing away old photographs that have lost their meaning. Still, early consumer sociologists studying digital identity performances (Schau 2004, notably) focused on the impermanence and fability of digital objects as a weakness: consumers placed less “personal value” in these objects because of the perceived ease with which they were lost. But that’s largely changed, of course - and my generation grew up with the haunting threat that everything we did would be “online forever.”
In that sense, then, I think these digital exchanges have significantly lost value - I’ve got a stack of Facebook memories waiting for me every day, but only a small folder, somewhere at my mom’s house, of notes I remembered to remove from my jeans before they went through the wash. The great fallibility of these memories seems to be the ease with which we can modify them, delete comments or entire exchanges, retroactively cull the digital patina to fit a narrative determined by our present day selves.
Indeed, “newer” digital formats like Snapchat and Instagram Stories - whatever Gen Z is into, idfk - seem purposely designed to emulate ephemerality, recreating the instantaneousness of the moment and the fleeting(ish)ness of memory in a way that feels more authentic than the painstakingly constructed Facebook stati of old. In that sense, as more and more of our social interactions take place online, they give us the sense of a return to a sort of norm. It’s not that these formats don’t lend themselves to artifice. Of course, they do. Because the digital objects they generate are fleeting in nature, they give us the satisfaction of watching a moment disappear behind us, lingering only temporarily before joining the indistinguishable flotsam and jetsam of lives lead in the digital realm.
Yet despite the ephemerality of the digital objects in question, they nonetheless create enduring conversations and social exchanges that contribute to a shared sense of self in the same way as the Facebook stati I grew up with. On the simplest level, the responses generated by an Instagram story contribute to its social and identiary meaning; although the digital object is fleeting, the contribution to an extended social narrative and platform-specific self remains as powerful as ever. Again, it is perhaps because of their ephemerality that they hold such social possibility: there’s a sense of “authenticity” that comes from that, perhaps a reaction to the overly-curated artifice of early social networks.
Of course, we’re now in the era of platform-specific selves: who I am on Instagram is not who I am on LinkedIn, or even Facebook. Rather than singular personal narratives, we’re assuming different pen names for different platforms, a complex web of characters tied by the knowledge - however tenuous - that there’s a Real Person somewhere behind it all. In that sense, our epistolary autobiographies are taking on the tone of an avant-garde play. But a fundamental truth remains - our online selves hardly belong to us alone. As perhaps has always been true in the physical realm, we’re the sum of the people we spend the most time with. The good news and the bad news is that now, a visible trace remains.
I’m what demographers and Atlantic think-piece writers refer to as a “Late Millennial”, which means that I was born in the early to mid 1990’s (the exact center point of that period, if you’re wondering). Like most of my late millennial peers, I grew up on an Internet far tamer, and more structured, than my older sister and her friends: my first social media profile was MySpace, but proceeded almost immediately after by the staid, self-serious Facebook. And that means, for better or worse, that a lot of my early teenage conversations and thoughts about the world are On The Internet. Indeed, Facebook is so kind as to resurface a daily collection of these posts as “Facebook Memories” - numeric photo albums and notes between friends, digital objects that they hope I’ll consume, and share, in a nostalgic dive into my halcyon days online.
I will never, ever do this, because these are conversations written by thirteen year olds, and never should have been made public in the first place. (I delete a lot of them as they come up, since apparently anyone can turn up President these days.) It’s nothing truly embarrassing or bad, just dumb, early teen stuff, like obvious exaggerations about being “soooo tired from playing my cool new guitar for five entire hours!!!” or the popular boys we’d totally flirted with at the school dance. And then there were the ensuing comment chains: we were all in peak “Random1!” phase, and what is it about being thirteen that inspires such a love of terrible inside jokes?
But as I browse my Facebook Memories, what really stands out to me is that portrait that stands before me is not of me alone. The person that I was on Facebook wouldn’t have existed without the comments, exchanges, and interactions I shared there with my friends. Some are now near-perfect strangers, some are still important parts of my life, but the remains of their presence on that platform are inseparably intertwined with mine. Their lines are indistinguishable parts of the story of my online self. Like a modern-day Lettres de Madame Sevigny, these exchanges weave a narrative about who I was and the thirteen year old personhood I shared with the world. They are, in a sense, my epistolary autobiography.
One of, I think, the interesting things about this was how intoxicating it was at that age to be able to express myself, seemingly without limit, using my “real identity”: the entire appeal of Facebook, as compared to LiveJournal or Myspace or whatever, was that this online profile was undeniably You. And because things were still a little underdeveloped at the time (or developed just about right, IMO), there wasn’t yet any broad, cultural understanding of a “postmodern self” native to different digital platforms: there was no LinkedIn You and Instagram You and Twitter You. The Facebook You was supposed to be the Real You, and that gave the things we did their a weight of validity and authenticity that no other contemporary platform had.
In the early-Internet context, sites like LiveJournal offered freedom of anonymity and self-invention: released from the shackles of their physical being, users were at liberty to embody idealized, fantasy versions of themselves. This was the early miracle of the Internet. The arrival of Facebook, then, was sort of radical for the time. You’d use your real name and a real picture, rather than an avatar. For the first time, Internet users found themselves asked to draw a realistic portrait of themselves. As we’d all soon discover, these digital identities were ultimately just as idealized as their predecessors - perhaps better hidden behind a curtain of artifice upheld by an association with our “real selves.”
This was way too much power in the hands of thirteen year olds: like the next several generations of teenagers to come after us, my friends and I were obsessed with composing, however clumsily, social narratives that would portray us as the people we wanted to be, as the people we saw ourselves becoming - hence all the exaggeration. (Personally, the number of boys I made out with at the big eighth grade dance was exactly zero.)
Yet as fantastical as a lot of those early posts were, their digital remnants at least call back wholesome, gueiless memories of ourselves from very tender time in my teenage life. They’re indistinguishable from the paper notes we passed back and forth in class, stuffed in a drawer somewhere at my mom’s house, or the strips of photobooth portraits that populated my sister’s notebook covers. My generation was among the first to digitize these social experiences, but I’ve found, with the passage of time, that many of the digital objects we created together are nearly as meaningful to me as the physical ones. Somewhere on my dad’s computer, for example, are pages and pages of AIM Logs. Every once in a while I’ll reread them, and it feels deeply intimate and personal - these online exchanges captured two people at their most authentic and candid.
On some level, it’s very normal, like developmentally, for teenage identities to feel closely intertwined. But I remember the extent to which - and this is still true - comments and interactions with friends became a part of the identitary narrative I was telling. Not unlike the way in which “dating the star Quarterback” was once a valuable tool in the construction of a teenage identity, the right person’s comment on your Facebook status was a very public line in a similar, on-going social performance. Because we were interacting with more permanent-feeling “digital objects” we were able to concretize and externalize these narratives in very visible ways.
This fusion of social relationships and personal identity is one of the principles of Belk’s “self-extension” model for understanding the link between what we consume and how we perceive ourselves. We use objects to represent, and to concretize, otherwise abstract or intangible ideas: memories, people, aspects of our identities. Digital objects, it turns out, work in much the same way. Although they’re dematerialized, digital objects offer the same social, identitary “use-value” for those who produce and consume them.
Like regular objects, their “materiality” might have a role in the generation and determination of that meaning. Because digital objects are very often interactive objects, they accrue what theorists refer to as “social metadata” - comments, likes, and other exchanges that modify the social meaning of the original digital object as originally generated. A much more poetic description for these metadatum is “digital patina.” (“The Extended Self in a Digital Age,” Belk 2011). I really love this turn of phrase. I find it beautifully illustrative, a call back to materiality, the way the wear and tear of an old leather jacket might bestow social meaning on its wearer.
This brings us to an important difference between digital objects and physical ones. Not unlike shared ownership of physical objects (sports jerseys, for example), the sharing of digital objects contributes to the creation of an “aggregate identity” for the owners. Perhaps because the boundaries of digital possession are so nebulous, so too are the limits of personal identity. As we share digital objects, we also share in “co-constructed” digital identities: “As such strings of short messages accumulate [...] they become less an expression of one person and more a joint expression of the couple or group that has composed them.” (Ibid, Belk 2011). The formation of this “aggregate sense of self” is referred to by Manghani as a “tender technology of the self.” The very public nature of these digital objects, coupled with an early-Facebook context that positioned our profiles as our “real selves,” makes it little wonder that these early online exchanges held so much identitary power for us.
Interestingly though, these digital memories are also far more moduable than their physical counterparts. Like I said, I often delete the more embarrassing ones as I come across them. I don’t know that it’s all that different than throwing away old photographs that have lost their meaning. Still, early consumer sociologists studying digital identity performances (Schau 2004, notably) focused on the impermanence and fability of digital objects as a weakness: consumers placed less “personal value” in these objects because of the perceived ease with which they were lost. But that’s largely changed, of course - and my generation grew up with the haunting threat that everything we did would be “online forever.”
In that sense, then, I think these digital exchanges have significantly lost value - I’ve got a stack of Facebook memories waiting for me every day, but only a small folder, somewhere at my mom’s house, of notes I remembered to remove from my jeans before they went through the wash. The great fallibility of these memories seems to be the ease with which we can modify them, delete comments or entire exchanges, retroactively cull the digital patina to fit a narrative determined by our present day selves.
Indeed, “newer” digital formats like Snapchat and Instagram Stories - whatever Gen Z is into, idfk - seem purposely designed to emulate ephemerality, recreating the instantaneousness of the moment and the fleeting(ish)ness of memory in a way that feels more authentic than the painstakingly constructed Facebook stati of old. In that sense, as more and more of our social interactions take place online, they give us the sense of a return to a sort of norm. It’s not that these formats don’t lend themselves to artifice. Of course, they do. Because the digital objects they generate are fleeting in nature, they give us the satisfaction of watching a moment disappear behind us, lingering only temporarily before joining the indistinguishable flotsam and jetsam of lives lead in the digital realm.
Yet despite the ephemerality of the digital objects in question, they nonetheless create enduring conversations and social exchanges that contribute to a shared sense of self in the same way as the Facebook stati I grew up with. On the simplest level, the responses generated by an Instagram story contribute to its social and identiary meaning; although the digital object is fleeting, the contribution to an extended social narrative and platform-specific self remains as powerful as ever. Again, it is perhaps because of their ephemerality that they hold such social possibility: there’s a sense of “authenticity” that comes from that, perhaps a reaction to the overly-curated artifice of early social networks.
Of course, we’re now in the era of platform-specific selves: who I am on Instagram is not who I am on LinkedIn, or even Facebook. Rather than singular personal narratives, we’re assuming different pen names for different platforms, a complex web of characters tied by the knowledge - however tenuous - that there’s a Real Person somewhere behind it all. In that sense, our epistolary autobiographies are taking on the tone of an avant-garde play. But a fundamental truth remains - our online selves hardly belong to us alone. As perhaps has always been true in the physical realm, we’re the sum of the people we spend the most time with. The good news and the bad news is that now, a visible trace remains.