Social Networking, the New High Society Party…

 

Who Are You?
In The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, socialite Jordan Baker asserts that she “like[s] large parties.  They’re so intimate.  At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”  Jordan goes on to enjoy this high society party hosted by Jay Gatsby, flittering among the masses.  Like a bee, she moves from flower to flower, or in her case person to person.  Similar to the symbiotic relationship between bees and flowers, Baker engages in an [information] exchange.  She pollinates by offering information and gathers nectar in the form of information.  Her statement suggests that such things could not occur in a smaller setting because the opportunity to syphon through personalities and ideologies does not present itself (touching once more on the relationship between embodiment and consciousness/awareness).  Moreover, her preference for obscurity within these crowds is demonstrative of her ability to situate herself among these personalities and identities (within this makeshift society of socialites).  While we are far from the days of flapper girls and the Jazz age, the idea of hiding out in the open is far from lost.  As a society we have not yet abandoned the notion situating ourselves among the myriad of personalities and ideologies that exist in mainstream society as we attempt to construct our identities. 

Today the high society parties in which we attempt to situate ourselves or construct our identities come to us in the form of social networking.  Bronwyn Williams stated that as we develop our identities via social networking “the writer of the page has composed to construct a performance of identity.” (25).  The advent of recent advancements in technology suggest that we interact more with each other along these long distance channels.  We experience more exposure to an interactive culture/popular culture which contributes to the construction of our identities:  personalities and ideologies.  Similar to the Baker’s preference, even we are prone pretentiousness when our favorite underground social networking site becomes more prevalent in mainstream society.  According to Bill Howard once a social networking site becomes more aligned with the tenets of “conventional wisdom” (14) its growth and popularity “makes a social networking site both impersonal and undesirable" (14).  We often believe that the ways in which we situate ourselves among social networking sites may define our identities.  In the same way, this type of development also suggests that sometimes social networking sites develop their own idnetities through their growth, acceptance, or rejection by mainstream soceity.

Another aspect prevalent among social networking, which can also be found within the context of a high society party, is the ability to define a system or ideology.  The idea of convergence theory suggests that through the medium of technology, connections among economic, cultural, historical, and social systems will occur.  Williams states, that “contemporary convergence culture [is] both filtered through and use[s] popular culture” (26) to establish a conception of ideology in mainstream society.  Alluding to Gee’s concept of affinity spaces, she contends that social networking provides an opportunity (as well as the ability) to “affiliate with others to share knowledge and gain knowledge…distributed and dispersed across many different people, places, Internet sites, and modalities” (32).  Through this type of socialization we understand that we now have the ability and opportunity to create new knowledge, influence new/existing knowledge, and develop our own identities and ideologies (as well as that of others) because the “definitions of literacy and performances of identity are complex social phenomena situated in cultural context” (29).  Like the denizens of the East Egg we develop our identities and ideology through the cultural context of socializtion; however, in our day we call it Facebook.