autobiography (n.): the biography of a person narrated by him- or herself

With the recent advent of social networking sites (recent compared to, say, the Protestant Reformation or the Punic Wars), self-description has become a literary form for the masses in a way that I think may be unique in history. People have kept diaries in every age, naturally, and people of note have written lengthy volumes about their own lives and times since time immemorial, but I am not aware of a period in the history of Western civilization in which common people wrote down descriptions of themselves explicitly for public consumption on a largely unrestricted basis. Granted, for much of the history of Western civilization, common people were illiterate, but I think that this status quo holds even through the better part of the twentieth century.

And then came Friendster, which I’m willing to aver was the first wildly popular social networking site, the first one where you could search for just about anyone with a pulse and an internet connection and get results. Friendster and its descendants Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Virb, and so forth (most of which have long since overtaken their sensei in membership numbers) have made self-description into a highly regimented aesthetic form. Where the sonnet forced the poet to think in three quatrains and a couplet, the profile forces the explicationist to think in interests, music, and movies. The different services compose their sets of fields slightly differently, and in general each one has an idiosyncrasy — Facebook offers quotes, Myspace offers heroes, Bebo offers “scared of” — but in general, they’re all heading in the same direction. I think the operating theory is that knowing someone’s favorite consumable media, visual, auditory and literary, gives you more insight into his or her character than almost anything else, and those fields plus a couple of catch-alls like “interests” and “activities” cover most everything.

Which is why the “About Me” section is often the most peculiar section of a profile. “About Me” is common to all sites, because naturally you have to give your user an opportunity to just plain say whatever. But what is there to say? “About Me” is the open-ended expanse, the blank canvas with the wall text already written. Placement of the field is key: when creating a Myspace page, “About Me” is the second field, after “Headline” (which is higher-level networking aesthetics) but before the entertainments, and when viewing the page it’s front and center. So people tend to use it for something; even among the irony-conscious, it can be sincere, though more often than not it tends to be, for instance:

• There is no ground to question the validity of Dr. Cook’s assertion that he reached the North Pole.
• I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing shtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz- griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.
• I’ve got a bike
  You can ride it if you like
  It’s got a basket
  A bell that rings
  And things to make it look good
• good boy.

Mine currently reads, “Adjective adjective pronoun verb pronoun verb, pronoun verb preposition preposition noun conjunction verb” — this is after having that bit about Lagarde in there for many months.

But on Facebook, the “About Me” field comes after everything else, and that has made all the difference. A great many people omit the “About Me” completely — I know I did for years — and, though I wish I had the stats to back it up, I think many if not most of those who do fill it in are all too happy to use it only flippantly:

• I’m bored.
• i love puppies.
• i’m a dork.
• I’m Tony the Tiger.
• I contemplate the dawn.
• Where the hell am I?
• Chipotle is that crack rock.
• [insert bio]

And, perhaps most telling,

• enough said.

Some people might take this as a depressing sign, that we live in such a consumer culture that we are defined by commercialized art forms and that everything else real that our best and brightest have to say about themselves fits into tiny boxes that are the same for everyone. I don’t agree — I think it’s a magnificent thing that an entire generation effortlessly matches content to form, infers the necessary character traits therefrom, and uses the extraneous whitespace to amuse and entertain.

Tags: aesthetic forms, facebook, myspace, pie