Who am I? Facebook version
Well, with the break in full swing, I spent an hour or so today creating a Facebook account. For those outside the college realm, Facebook (like MySpace) is a massive social networking tool that is pretty much universally used by my students. You create your own "profile" and then add friends who have their own profiles. You can post messages to one another, share pictures, and basically do all manner of social interactions online. Most interesting were some of the friends I found from high school--still deciding whether or not to make a "friend" request to them. Since so many of my students use it and I've had a few of them request me as a friend, I decided to set something up.
One of the main ways you identify yourself on this (and similar) tools is to list things you're into--interests, books, music, movies, etc. I've always found this a difficult task, but I'm not sure why. On one level, it's interesting that we identify ourselves by the things we consume or how we spend our time. In some measure, it's probably because I feel a little uncomfortable with the picture those things paint. I'm not particularly into music at this stage of life, and bands I would list aren't particularly trendy, or even much related to my real interests. It's interesting there's no "radio program" preferences, which would probably say more than anything about me. Or favorite theologians. After a semester of political economic geography, there's an element of what Foucault called governmentality here--users' identities are constructed in particular ways--I'm supposed to be really interested in books, movies, and music. I'm chafing against that. Of course, there is a generic "About Me" section, but who knows what that's supposed to be.