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Livejournal Userpics and Fractured Selves in Web 2.0

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Livejournal Userpics and Fractured Selves in Web 2.0 6 • Articles • Identity in 10,000 Pixels: LiveJournal Userpics and Fractured Selves in Web 2.0 B. GRANTHAM ALDRED Kendall College Abstract: In the virtual world of Web 2.0, what is the “self”? How do people create a tangible image of self that is linked to user generated-content when limited to a static series of avatars, and how does this inform our understanding of critical questions about identity and representation online? Using semiotics, psychoanalysis, and folklore, this article examines userpics in the world of LiveJournal, and analyzes how a group of users negotiate their identity with repertoires of 100 x 100 userpics. Drawing on research among LiveJournal users, the article presents a new view on the fractured nature of identity, exploring the epistemic nature of the avatar/self. “Who are the folk in cyberspace… [and] what makes them different from the traditional folk? What are the constraints and exigencies that dictate how they carry themselves in an Internet context?” ~ Trevor J. Blank (2009, 11) The conceptualization of identity has been at the forefront of critical thinking about the Internet for at least as long as the New Yorker has been publishing pictures of computer using dogs. Researchers have repeatedly adressed these complexities as a problem for the scholar, focusing on the issues that must be addressed in ethnographic work (see Dorst 1990; Ellis 2003; Frank 2004; Howard 2008; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996, 1998). Given that the concept of identity on the Internet is still nascent, involving instabilities and strategies not present in more established cultures, a folkloric approach grounded in the study of performance Vol. 8, no. 1/2 (2010) 7 sheds light on the relationship between such communication and identity. By looking at the communication of identity as the deployment of a repertoire of creative identifiers (“userpics” on the website LiveJournal), it is possible to examine how individuals negotiate and balance multiple identities through performance. Identity on LiveJournal cannot be represented traditionally. Monica Foote suggests that “people represent themselves [online] with scraps of art cobbled together into images that distinguish themselves from their fellow users” (2007, 27). Foote analyzes the ways in which memetic themes develop within online artistic fora devoted to icon creation, exploring the development of genres and patterns in icon creation but stops short of dicussion about their use; this leaves the impression that the creation of the icon is the most folkloric aspect. A more important issue to consider is how this art is used. How is a folklorically-created repertoire of icons deployed to form those connections between self and group that are the essence of culture? Is there a core form of cultural expression of identity readable in this deployment? As Lynne McNeill observes, “the digital world is a culture, one that a person can be native or non-native to” (2009, 81). This culture, like all cultures, includes a form by which members identify themselves in context similar to the decoration of the body, one of the key sites of identity in folkloric study. With this in mind, the goal of this article is to examine a specific set of communicative acts, specifically the use of “userpics” to represent the self online in the online community of LiveJournal. These pictures form a locus of identity negotiation embedded in online interaction. By understanding the use of these New Directions in Folklore 8 pictures as acts of power connected to subject positioning, I hope to shed light on the ways in which the symbolic evinces agency. In folklore, identity is rarely treated as adhering to an individual. Folklorists have traditionally located identity in cultures and texts, exploring the ways in which groups emerge from shared creative works. One exception to this comes in the exploration of embodied folklore in the scholarship of dress and bodily movement. Many folkloric scholars have examined the folkloric implications of the embodied performance of the self (Noyes 1993; Skukla 2008; Young 1993), andthey have generally concluded that the artistic construction of the embodied self has deep folkloric implications—a system of signs that is deeply important to culture, perhaps its deepest expression. But what about groups whose interactions are inherently disembodied? Can there be an art of the self when its most powerful symbol, the body, is unavailable? When Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett asks, “What do terms like group or community mean when strangers at computer terminals at the far ends of the world type messages to each other?” (1998, page 284), she seems to be contemplating ‘how do we have community without embodied identity?’ A cynical answer is that ‘we can’t,’ but, as I hope to show, identity remains on the Internet, creatively deployed and still unified. Web 2.0 The medium in which I propose to examine these manifestations is one of the cornerstones of Web 2.0: the blogging website LiveJournal (also known as LJ). One Vol. 8, no. 1/2 (2010) 9 of the key parts of the Web 2.0 milieu, blogging has dominated much of the user dominated content dimension of the web. The activity of blogging, short for weblogging, is a form of open journaling, in which users create a shared space in which to display their writings. Originally the province of the programming enthusiast, blogs became a major phenomenon in the early 2000s, with high profile political blogs, extensive media review blogs, and a number of celebrities such as Author Neil Gaiman, Actor Wil Wheaton and Television Weatherman Al Roker keeping public blogs. In addition to tech specialists and those who employ them, the general public gained access to blogging through user-friendly interface services such as LiveJournal, Blogger, and Blogspot. LiveJournal, founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, describes itself as “an online journal service with an emphasis on user interaction.”1 As of September 2010, LiveJournal had 30.3 million journals. Using either web-based interfaces or downloadable clients, users maintain “LiveJournals” as part of an expanding network of “virtual communities” and personal connections. Through the use of this service, they are able to present their thoughts to the world, or at least a select part of it. It is a new medium of communication through which people can engage in virtual conversation unmediated by space and time. Interestingly, while other blogging sites have waned in popularity with the rise of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, LiveJournal has maintained significant popularity among online interest groups, maintaining popularity due to the capacity for additional content. New Directions in Folklore 10 On LiveJournal, as in all computer-mediated communication, some issues arise in terms of how identity is represented. While there are specific communicative tools used to distinguish users, there are questions as to how well these actually represent identity given the lack of the body. Many potentially useful theories about identity come in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s conception of ‘fractured identities,’ that an individual does not have a single coherent identity that can be examined, but instead is the site of a number of identities, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping, but not understandable as a single united identity. Where Lacan’s reading is internal, cultural studies scholar Satya Mohanty expands this multiplicity to understand social identity, stating that “Identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways” (2003, 398). Mohanty’s expansion gives a specific orientation for the study of identity that can be useful in understanding the ways in which identity and communication interact. These theories, based in both psychoanalytic concepts of the self and the semiotics of representation, help to explore the concept of the self without the body. While this article cannot deal with every intersection of identity and communication, or even every aspect of identity and communication on LiveJournal, I will look at a specific manifestation of identity in the LiveJournal: the userpic or avatar. While many have used the term “avatar” to represent an online visual identity, the emic usage of userpic or icon will be used in this context.2 One of the Vol. 8, no. 1/2 (2010) 11 key means of communication available to LiveJournal users is a self-created repertoire of pictorial representations that can be attached to anything written on LiveJournal. The selection/creation of repertoire, the deployment of userpics as facets of identity and the dynamics of group and personal identity all provide ripe ground to view the usage of userpics as a manifestation of creative expression in small groups, understanding this as a form of folkloric performance linked to identity. Identity As folkloristics primarily focuses on the embodied, it is necessary to establish a theoretical framework of identity. Jacques Lacan first introduced to the world the notion of “fractured identities” in his Écrits (2002 [1966]). This idea, in brief, indicates that identity does not exist within individuals as a contiguous object, but as a conglomeration of multiple partially overlapping identities. Lacan’s concept, while useful for psychoanalytic considerations of the self, falls apart when conceptualizing the practice of identity. Lacan’s conceptualization theorizes a linguistic split to identity, reading individual identities as temporally cohesive and symbolic. While it is possible to call out multiple manifestations of identity in an individual leading to the appearance of fractures, the fractures emerge in the calling out rather than within the identity of the individual. In order to cogently present my interpretation of fractured identities, there are several theoretical concepts that I will explicitly define, namely my New Directions in Folklore 12 interpretation of the relationship between Lacan’s concept of the Real and the Symbolic, the concept of the “subject,” and what I call “instanced identity,” which is a way of conceptualizing identity as temporally manifest and conceptually limited.
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