SNS Reflection

The recent class focus on Social Networking Sites like Myspace has revealed a number of my own memories about my prior use of social networking sites like Myspace. I can relate many of the themes of the articles and discussions to my own experiences. It has been interesting to analyze my own use of SNS in terms of these articles.

In the beginning of high school, Myspace was the most popular SNS at my school so I obliged with the trend and created a profile. Within hours of creating my profile I was fascinated with this new world of social networking sites. I can remember the importance of profile building and the social and technical codes associated with it. Many of my friends spent hours building their profiles and searching for html codes to manipulate the appearance of their profiles. I remember the arduous process of deciding which photo to make your default and other tasks that now seem trivial, but were once important components to your identity performance, or how you chose to present yourself to the Myspace world.

After six hours of school, two hours of swim practice and hours of homework I would finally be able to check Myspace and be able to explore the profiles of my friends and classmates. This experience of using Myspace as a release and as a change of pace from the "structured lives of teens outside and inside the home" most definitely was in line with my use of Myspace as a SNS.

Writing this post prompted me to see if I could still access my Myspace profile which I hadn't accessed since high school. After contemplating over which email address and password I used at the time, I was finally able to access an aspect of my life that was once seemed so important. This experience proved to be very reflexive about the way I was once portrayed myself online. I am now much more conscious about what I post online. Maturity and more visibility to adults may be the catalysts for my more mature portrayal on Facebook. It was quite the trip down memory lane examining my prior SNS use. The experience has actually revealed a lot about how I much I have changed in the past two or three years. In some ways it was like looking at an old yearbook, seeing my closest friends at the time, and my primary interests. I encourage everyone to check out their old SNS profiles to see how much they have changed and how differently they may interact on social networking sites now. In the future we may see SNS profiles functioning more in this way, as place-markers and reminders of old times and former personas.