"Your profile background is sooo five minutes ago!"

Last week, Goffman’s presentation of the self was explored and applied to teenage girls. This week, I will be looking at Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity, and how this concept and its connected ideas can be related to teenage girls’ online identities.


Bauman’s work is fascinating. He uses the metaphor of liquids to describe modern society. According to Bauman, liquids “do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change” (2000: 2), and as such, life in liquid modernity is lived the same way. In Liquid Life, he explains that liquid modernity is “a society is which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines” (2005: 1) and that “liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty” (2005: 2). Throughout his work on liquid modernity, the emphasis is on this idea of precarious uncertainty, and the need for the individual to keep up with the constantly changing world – or perish. Bauman also suggests liquid modernity is a society of consumers, and that everything, including identity and relationships, is commodified and treated as something to be consumed.


The teenage girls of today’s society have grown up surrounded by some degree of liquidity. This can especially be seen in the omnipresent technology that they could not bear to live without – almost the moment something is bought it becomes outdated and superseded by something bigger (or smaller) and better. The nature of the Web 2.0 technologies that are a large part of their everyday lives emanate liquidity – content can be, and is, constantly changing, and if you do not keep up with it you will undoubtedly fall behind with no hope of catching up.


Mallan and Giardina (2009) introduce the idea of ‘wikidentities’ to refer to the collaborative nature of identity creation in teens that goes on in online environments such as MySpace, comparing it to much of the content created on Web 2.0 platforms such as wikis.

A concomitant feature of Web 2.0’s ability for connectivity is its enabling approach to identity construction that extends notions of how identity is constructed within language and discourse. The collaborative approach to identity construction undertaken in SNS provides a space whereby an identity is “assembled” by drawing on a diverse set of materials and tools. When an individual or a group constructs an online profile, the resultant “identity” gives a particular interpretation or representation. Consequently, this “wikidentity” becomes a particular, collaborative process that changes according to purpose, context, and form. (Mallan & Giardina, 2009: 2-3)

This approach to understanding identity online assists explanations as to why and how teenage girls are “changing identities as often as they change clothes” (Chandler, 2007: 4). Mallan and Giardina go on to note that the content on girls’ profiles “offer temporary, contextualised accounts of the students at a moment in time. The ephemeral nature of their profiles, which [are] apt to change regularly or be disbanded, is in step with the nature of a wiki which can be changed, edited, culled or replaced” (2009: 5). Teenage girls’ identities online become liquid, temporary presentations, which can be changed, or even deleted, with the click of a button. In her article, Chandler spoke to teenage girls who reflected on their profiles. One stated it “reflects how I feel at a time”, and it was noted that another “changes her profile maybe once a month. It varies with her mood – colourful one minute, starkly monochrome the next” (2007: 6-7). A lot of this change also occurs as a result of changing attitudes and preferences amongst their peer group, which also fit the notion of liquidity.



In a guide for parents, MySpace Unraveled suggests that the profiles of teenage girls “present a self defined in relation to others” (Magid & Collier, 2007: 15) and also a self that is composed partly of who or what they want to be identified with (Mazzarella, 2005). With the proneness to change inherent in the many fashions that apply to the life of a teenage girl, they seek validation from their peers in order to ensure their profile does not ‘fall behind’. The instantaneous nature of the internet grants them greater control over these aspects of their identity. The precarious nature of liquid life that Bauman talks about also applies to teenage girls’ sense of self online. If something on their MySpace profile goes out of fashion, they can, and must, change it immediately, in order to ‘keep up’ with everyone else.

Fashions come and go with mind-boggling speed, all objects if desire become obsolete, off-putting and even distasteful before they have time to be fully enjoyed. Styles of life which are ‘chic’ today will tomorrow become targets of ridicule (Bauman, 2005: 162).

The consuming nature of liquid life not only means that everything is treated as something to be consumed that has a limited useful life, but also that people’s identities are also determined by their consumption. Due to the truly liquid nature of the internet, teenage girls are more able to maintain an acceptable identity online than would be possibly in ‘reality’ - a liquid identity that is temporary are prone to change. This aspect will be discussed further in my post next week, which will examine the notion of teenage girls’ identities online in relation to both Bauman and Goffman’s ideas in order to come up with a more rounded idea of the nature of these identities.

References:
Bauman, Z (2000), Liquid Modernity, Polity: Cambridge.

Bauman, Z (2005), Liquid Life, Polity: Cambridge.

Chandler, J (2007), 'The Virtual Generation', The Age, 14 August, 2007, accessed on 13/9/09.

Magid, L & Collier, A (2007), MySpace Unraveled: A Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking, Peachpit Press: Berkeley.

Mallan, K & Giardina, N (2009), 'Wikidentities: Young people collaborating on virtual identities in social network sites', First Monday, Vol. 14, No. 6, 1 June 2009.

Mazzarella, S (Ed) (2005), 'Claiming a space: The cultural economy of teen girl fandom on the web', in Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity, Peter Lang: New York.