Scrawled in Wax

So: Microsoft’s ’small’ investment of $240 million has revealed that at least someone thinks Facebook is worth $15 billion. But now that things have had time to settle in a bit, the big question now is “so what?“. Most analysis so far has focused on longevity, essentially looking at how can Facebook increase its ad delivery in the long term and also how it might monetize other things like music so that it might finally have a comprehensive and sustainable business model.

But the focus on Facebook’s ‘usefulness to its users’ - i.e. what function it serves as a social medium - is only one aspect of Facebook. Part of Facebook’s worth that I think has been largely overlooked (except in this piece here in the Globe) is the value of online identities to users. What I am concerned with here is not the function of the identity - i.e. what one can do to stay in touch with others or read advertising or purchase products - but what the actual construction of an identity means to the person who created it.

All discussion of online identities have historically been constructed as supplementary - that online identities are an incomplete, shadowy representation of one’s real life that work like little appendices to one’s existence. But I wonder to what extent people are starting to conceive of their Facebook identities as part of who they are; and, furthermore, that the investments in something like a Facebook profile is akin to creating a particular ‘look’ or ’style’ or other such visual manifestation of one’s identity.

The process of constructing a Facebook profile is to ask yourself what you want to present to the world. Particularly since the arrival of F8, you can choose if you want your taste in films, music, books or a host of other markers of taste displayed in your profile. Our profiles are projections of what we either hope to be or how we hope to be perceived. Thus Facebook profiles have become as sociologically interesting as Second Life avatars; as my much-smarter-than-me friend once said, the reason Second Life is so important is because when it comes to identity, fantasy is the real - that how we project ourselves in fantasy or online identities reveals what we value and why. There is a reason that Second Life contains so many hyper-sexualised characters, much like there is a reason that so many Facebook profiles are filled with carefully picked photographs or deliberately chosen music.

As such, the question becomes to what extent people will grow attached to the projection that is their online profile. In much the same way people are loathe to give up their WoW avatars, will people start to feel the same way about their profiles? Will they be willing to pay to keep the online version of themselves around? And will the idea of identity as a set of images and projections be only further cemented by the epistemological shift to internet culture? So, while you mull those over, I’m off to add some obscure post-rock to my Facebook page…