Medialität der Nähe: Situationen - Praktiken - Diskurse [1. Aufl.] 9783839416440

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Pablo Abend, Tobias Haupts, Claudia Müller (Hg.) Medialität der Nähe

Locating Media 1 Situierte Medien

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Editorial Orts- und situationsbezogene Medienprozesse erfordern von der Gegenwartsforschung eine innovative wissenschaftliche Herangehensweise, die auf medienethnographischen Methoden der teilnehmenden Beobachtung, Interviews und audiovisuellen Korpuserstellungen basiert. In fortlaufender Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Methodenspektrum perspektiviert die Reihe Locating Media/Situierte Medien die Entstehung, Nutzung und Verbreitung aktueller geomedialer und historischer Medienentwicklungen. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Situierung der Medien und durch Medien. Die Reihe wird herausgegeben von Gabriele Schabacher, Jens Schröter, Erhard Schüttpelz und Tristau Thielmann.

PABLO ABEND, ToBrAs HAUPTS, CLAUDIA MüLLER (He.)

Medialität der Nähe Situationen - Praktiken - Diskurse

[ transcript]

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http:/ jdnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

Die Verwertung der Texte und Bilder ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages urheberrechtswidrig und strafbar. Das gilt auch für Vervielfaltigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und für die Verarbeitung mit elektronischen Systemen. Umschlaggestaltung: Pablo Abend Umschlagabbildung: © Pablo Abend, 2oro Lektorat und Satz: Pablo Abend, Tobias Haupts, Claudia Müller Druck: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-r644-6 Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier mit chlorfrei gebleichtem Zellstoff. Besuchen Sie uns im Internet: http:jjwww.transcript-verlag.de Bitte fordern Sie unser Gesamtverzeichnis und andere Broschüren an unter: [email protected]

Inhalt

Annäherung an eine Medialität der Nähe: Einleitung Pablo Abend/Tobias Haupts/Claudia Müller

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SEKTION 1: NAHRÄUME Aesthetics of the Self: Materiality and Connectivity in the Digital Age

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Heather A. Horst

1-, Mii & MySpace. Mediale Figurationen des Nächsten Regine Buschauer

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>>Post your desktop!the girls will probably tel! you that they are mad at meher< new MySpace page and the covert measures she needed to take to access the page (usually at a friend's house), Ann's interest in MySpace began to decline.

AESTHETICS OF THE SELF

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IMAGINING COLLEGE LIFE ON FACEBOOK Ann's dwindling participation in MySpace corresponded with a series of rites of passage associated with middle dass American teenage life: prom, graduation and, for the privileged, a post-graduation trip with friends to a resort in Mexico. Although Ann did not consider herself to be academically at the top of her dass, she ultimately had the choice of a small, liberal arts college in Washington state or a school in the California State University system which offered Ann a small swimming scholarship. Her other friends, many of whom were accomplished athletes, opted for one of the large land grant schools in the University of California system, such as University of California, Irvine and University of California, Davis. Not long after she accepted her offer to a liberal arts college in Washington state, Ann received an invitation to participate in Facebook, a social networking site originally designed for the college community (see fig. 3). By the time I interviewed Ann again, she was fully immersed in the transition into a new phase of her life and, in turn, a new set of social practices. Ann's formal introduction to Facebook came through her future dorm's RA (Resident Assistant). Ann's RA sent her an invite to be part of the >Crystal Mountain< wing, part of a wider network of ninety dorm residents attending her new college. In the first two weeks after accepting the invitation and creating a page and profile, Ann spent hours at a time perusing different people's sites, looking for familiar names and faces and checking out friends of friends. Although unable to re-construct her page in brown and pink as she did on MySpace, Ann eventually added a picture of herself hiking in Mexico. As the summer progressed, she felt that she was becoming >>addicted« to Facebook, checking it anytime she has a free moment, typically for about ten minutes at a time. Arm checked her Facebook for status updates (e.g. if someone has changed their profile) an average of four to five times per day, in effect almost anytime she returned home. Through this brief, repetitive engagement, Ann started to meet the other students slated to live in her dorm, the most important and exciting of these new connections being her future roommate Sarah. Describing her Facebook page, Ann enthusiastically explains: >>And you can see everyone else's dorm room and I have groups. Like everyone in my dorm room is in this group. And you can see like all the others [... ] and so like I can

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see who my RA is going to be and stuff and so it's like really cool. And then I have - I can show you my roommate! It's really exciting. So I can see her. And so it's, I don't know, I can just see a picture of her instead of having to wait and stuff.«

Fig. 3: Ann checking her Facebook page

Over the course of the summer, Ann and Sarah >poked< each other and wrote on each other's walls continuously. 5 Some of these conversations were pragmatic, such as when they planned to move up, how much »stuff« they had or what classes they thought they might take. But the substance of many of these conversations involved exploring how Sarah and Ann would >get alongpoking< as a way to interact with friends that is non-specific: »A poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook. When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings.«, http://www.facebook.com/ help.php?page = 20, May 22, 2008 .

AESTHETICS OF THE SELF

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be a shared aesthetic. The first clues she detected involved Sarah's taste in music and media. As Ann describes: •>But actually her and I like a Iot of the same music, I could tell from her Facebook. And so we were talking about concerts that we've been to this summer and stuff. So I'm sure - 'cause she's bringing a TV 'cause she lives in a really, really rich area of Washington. And so I think she's bringing a really nice TV, so I'm like I should probably bring something kind of nice. So I think 1'11 bring this [ipod speakers] and then we can both hook our iPods up whenever we want.. .I'm supposed to bring a microwave but I don't think 1'11 bring a microwave.«

As becomes evident in her discussion of what to bring to college, Ann was not just looking for shared interests or commonalities. She was also working to construct an aesthetic balance through consumer goods such as iPod speakers which she perceives as >>something kind of nice«. Purchasing new, trendy iPod speakers complemented a »really nice TV« and created a space where they might share interests and, by extension, friendship. In addition to discerning each other's taste in music and media, Ann and Sarah also decided to upload a few pictures of their bedrooms at home onto their Facebook pages of things they planned to bring to their new dorm room (cf. Young 2004, 2005). Ann was thrilled when she looked at the photographs and saw Sarah's signature colors, »I'm brown and pink stuff and she's brown and blue stuff!«. Ann surmised that this aesthetic harmony would also signify a harmonious relationship.

CONCLUSION: YOUTH AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE SELF Individuality is highly valued in the United States, particularly in a place like Silicon Valley where culture and competition are closely intertwined (English-Lueck 2002; Saxenian 2006). In American society, adolescence is segmented as a particularly important time for discovering and expressing a sense of self that seems >Uniquely< one's own, an identity which is separate and autonomaus from given social relationships, such as families, neighborhoods and communities (although see Coontz 1992). The locations of selfmaking and, in the language of Erving Goffman, the »presentation of the

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self« have roughly corresponded with interplay between the front stage (public) and the back stage (private spaces). 6 In the age of networked public culture, the boundaries between the public and private presentations of the self are increasingly blurred. Beginning with Hugh Miller's (1995) application of Goffman's symbolic interactionist approach to homepages, the focus on >face< and presentation have remairred central to the study of the constitution of the self and individual identity on the internet, especially the formal (and often static and textual) presentations on webpages and other online sites. However, the material properties of new media and social network sites like MySpace and Facebook not only shape the way that these are expressed but, increasingly, the very terms and definitions of self. In addition to maintaining a collection of >>friends« (boyd 2008, 2009), MySpace enabled Ann to customize the background color and font of her profile page in the same color palate as her bedroom. It was also possible to add favorite songs, videos and a range of other features. Indeed, MySpace makes it easy to >Copy and paste< html code from other's profile pages and websites so that one can customize and copy the style on one's webpage, this ability to customize ultimately undermined Ann's friends attempts to recreate a profile after Ann's parents forced her to delete her profile out of fear of the >ScaJe, of MySpace (cf. Perkel 2008). The ability to delete and recreate profiles thus structures a very different engagement with digital spaces. In cantrast to MySpace, Facebook's basic blue and white template occurs on all profiles, allowing members to upload pictures and customize their information. For this reason, Ann appropriated Facebook to develop a sense of her future roommate's interests through pictures and to discern decora-

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For Goffrnan (1959), the front is »that part of the individual's performance which regularly functions in a generat and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance" (22), the space where one »gives off" impressions to others. Although much of the interaction during the performance shapes the continued interaction, Ionger-term identity formation takes place in the back stage, the location where the individual internalizes what has been learned in the performance. As Robinson (2007) observes, »the self internalizes the social world as part of the process of anticipating and interpreting the ,generalized otheri-Mii< oder >MySpace< verweisen, unschwer erkennbar, auf bestimmte Formen neuer Medien und zugleich auf einen Brennpunkt auch und gerade populärer Diskussionen um einen gegenwärtigen Wandel der Medien, die >Uns< geradezu ungehörig nahe gekommen zu sein scheinen. Es ist im Besonderen das >ie< für >electronici< [ai] in die Schlagzeilen geraten, das gleichermaßen für >InformationInternet>iKult" zu lesen, vom iPad, mit dem >>die Welt verändertRevolution« der Medien oder auch nur Produkte, proklamiert nicht zuletzt im so lautenden Codenamen der Entwicklung von Nintendos Wii-Konsole, die und deren Präsentation des >Miii< steht. In welcher Weise also ist, so die im Folgenden angesetzte Leitfrage, der so breit konstatierte gegenwärtige Wandel eines >i< wie auch eines >Mii< und >My< der Medien als ein Wandel oder ein Neues der Nähe beschreibbar, und: gegenüber welchem >Alten