It is difficult not to occasionally smile a bit wryly when people take to Twitter to decry the ‘inanity’ and ‘narcissism’ of location app Foursquare. Like Twitter before it, a brief description of the service—that it “combines social networking and games to allows users to document, share and earn rewards and badges for publicizing their whereabouts—seems a bit baffling, particularly if one already feels that social networking encourages a bit too much self-concern.
Still, also like Twitter, Foursquare can be unexpectedly interesting, particularly in its capacity to create a ongoing narrative of sorts about an individual’s doings. It is quite easy to look back upon one’s list of ‘check-ins’ and recall that evening you saw an amazing band or that date that went surprisingly well. As I’ve argued repeatedly about Twitter, by centralising and publishing a person’s activity at a virtual ‘place’, Foursquare produces a personalised text of what you’ve been up to.
Yet, as someone once asked me on Twitter when discussing the service, why can’t you simply write where you’ve gone in a diary? What’s more, why must you create a record of where you are and where you have been it all?
The question sounds very similar to the classic Twitter criticism: “why would I care what some random person is having for lunch?”. And like that question (both misguided and inaccurate as it is), the response has something to do with not only the ambient social awareness fostered by real-time social networking, but also the difference between writing something privately and writing something publicly.
When we publicize actions, there is obviously a desire for something that is not met by private writing. It’s a call out to something and for something: for recognition, for engagement and for legitimacy. To write publicly is to write oneself into the social, to stitch oneself into the shared exterior space we call the common.
So checking in on Foursquare is many things: beyond the gaming aspect (in which, when you check-in somewhere more than anyone else over 60 days, you are awarded the title ‘Mayor’, which can carry real rewards), it also is act of deliberately making yourself public in order to see yourself there. To wit, you check in so you can check yourself out, making yourself into a kind of public persona or representation.
Frequently, this act is positioned as a weakness of sorts – that you only need the recognition and legitimacy conferred by the public space if you are somehow lacking. But hovering on the fringes of the accusation is an an act of forgetting caused by privilege. If you, through whatever collection of cultural and social capital, have never had to question your status as a legitimate member of society, it is easy to forget that this legitimacy often stems from being able to see oneself reflected in the public sphere. Given that not everyone gets to check that, yes, ‘the President’s hair is just like mine’, rather than just narcissism, to write oneself publicly can also be an ongoing project in which we make ourselves real to ourselves my creating a public image of ourselves.
To make oneself real, however, is not only to make oneself public – it is to make oneself public in a manner both recognised and affirmed by current social standards. You insert yourself into a network of legitimacy by performing ‘correctly’, and interestingly enough, when it comes to contemporary phenomena like Twitter and Foursquare, use of the network itself as well as one’s activity on it confers a kind of cultural capital.
So a Foursquare profile is an expression of desire, not only for connection, but also, in its own small way, but for the solidity of autobiography (and thus, we return to Mr. Penumbra).
This is only one aspect of Foursquare. After all, another trait is that it’s (apparently) a good way to meet people. But by constructing ‘checking in’ as an act of writing, it helps lay bare the mutually constitutive nature of the public and private in the self. What is inalienably and inextricably inside – i.e. subjectivity – is built from the ‘outside’ of the public space. To write oneself there is to make oneself real both in it and through it according to its rules. You are sutured into the public space by both constructing yourself in its image, but also seeing oneself presented there – and the strange tension between the joyous relief of affirmation and coercive fear of conformity never disappears.
So, the next question to consider then: what happens to both writing and the self when utterances are not, as 20th century linguists discovered only social – but persistently public too?
