All that Glitters

By Ian, on September 10th, 2007

I came across a great paper today called Vernacular Web 2, which is about two things in particular:

The golden age of the ‘Welcome to my web page’ sites: the ones with the starry backgrounds, midi music on autoplay and animated gifs. These expressions of folk art were reviled by designers and internet intelligentsia alike throughout the course of the late 90s. To the extent that they seem to only exist today in the form of clever pastiches.
That these pages find their contemporary analogue in [~~ugly~~] MySpace pages.

The author — Olia Liliana — charts the emergence of glitter graphics on MySpace pages. Glitter gifs are the epitome of the vernacular web. They link both to the Barbie world of a particular subset of teenage girls and to the bling culture of hip-hop music. Maybe bratz providing the link between the two. This joint heritage gives them an unusually large influence over a swathe of teenagers of different ages and sexes. The author notes that to a teenage girl today — those ‘digital natives’ — a glitter gif on their MySpace profile has no emotional distinction from the glitter stickers that they might put onto their school exercise books. It’s a great point and a really pertinent way to illustrate the way teenagers now differ from people like me who created their first web sites by hand back in the 90s (I still quite like my own internet skeleton closet, I’m pleased to say).

This is also about class and control. As danah boyd noted in July, there are class distinctions attached to which social network one chooses: the tidy, Ivy League, muted-blue of Facebook or the Bash Street Comprehensive multicolour of MySpace. That gap is also a difference — a really important difference — between expression in words alone and expression through sound, layout, pictures and jewellery, I think. Why do you think MySpace is so popular with creative artists? MySpace is visceral and multisensory; Facebook is guarded and controlled. (I know and I agree — this probably overstates the case — the nature of a social network probably has less to do with the software and more to do with the nature of your network and the way you play with each other). Nonetheless, you get the point when it comes to the design of each of these applications. Liliana suggests that users who adopt the provided templates on Web 2.0 sites like iGoogle are being put in their place, interpolated, if you like — that they are accepting their allotted role as amateurs; as users.

I wonder, though, if this latter distinction is valid. Facebookers as conformist yes-men; MySpacers as the rebel yell. While self-expression through the wilful disregard of ‘good taste’ is rebellious on one level, on another it is equally consumerised. Those webkinz and habbos and glitter stickers cost real money, are subject to real peer forces of control and subjugation and to corporate interventions. The number of genuinely original layouts for MySpace profiles is pretty limited, I think, and a lot of those have been created by professional designers. A lot of profiles have been bought from or advertise design shops. [Though maybe the geeks have an escape route — get some sort of kudos through their 133t skillz with CSS]. For the teens, I imagine there’s nothing new. The wrong colour of glitter on your MySpace, I guess, is equivalent to wearing the wrong trainers to school — the ones your mum got from the market. At the same time, Facebook apps are allowing users to disrupt the clean and calm veneer of the application — to much distress in some quarters. However, I think I can believe in the jist of the argument. Facebook is more conformist than MySpace. Bringing this to the mass adoption of Facebook and not MySpace by the tech-blogger world: I guess the implications are obvious — we’re people who prefer to express ourselves with words because we wore the wrong trainers to school so often that visceral self-expression seems painfully risky.

You may want to install this on your Facebook. Fight the power. Fight the power.

[Edited for idiocy and sense — it’s ended up painfully note-y as a result. Enjoy the music, if not the pictures.]