This study surveys recent research on print-era scrapbooks and contemporary social media to highlight commonalities between the two formats, both in terms of the practices they have historically promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers. It argues that scrapbooks and social media can be conceptualized as sites of personal media assemblage and personal media archives, a designation that highlights the simultaneously social and archival dimensions of each form. After discussing these formal similarities, the author identifies three shared functions: (1) documenting friendship, (2) navigating new media abundance, and (3) communicating taste and building cultural capital. By drawing functional and formal parallels between the two media, the goal is to observe how these ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies might mutually shed light on each other’s neglected social and archival dimensions, offering scholars a wider range of angles from which to approach them as cultural and biographical texts.
KeywordsArchiveassemblagebiographycultureephemeraFacebookhistorynew mediascrapbooksocial media
Northwestern University, USA
Corresponding author(s):
Katie Day Good, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Email: kdgood@u.northwestern.edu
For scholars studying Facebook and other social media, some recent research about a much older medium − the print-era scrapbook − might sound surprisingly familiar. Like social media profiles, scrapbooks are deeply social texts. They are packed with personal information but are also problematic. As objects that were both popular and marginal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scrapbooks have sparked dialogues among cultural historians, literary scholars and archivists over how to extract meaning from them (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008; Tucker et al., 2006; Zboray and Zboray, 2009). The trouble with scrapbooks can be broken down into three broad categories that are relevant to studies of social media. A primary concern is about the validity of the scrapbook as a historical or biographical text (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008). Scrapbooks are rarely edited, nor are they ‘finished’ like formal publications. Instead they are messy, fragmentary and highly individualized. Scrapbooks have not achieved the ‘official’ or authoritative status of published media like newspapers or books; rather, they tend to be personal collections of ephemera that are themselves ephemeral (Tucker et al., 2006: 18). Second, it is unclear what kinds of functions scrapbooks served for their users in the past. Were they mostly private objects for storing thoughts and memories, as is commonly assumed, or did they also serve a more immediate and social purpose? Finally, how should scholars approach scrapbooks as personal archives and historical artifacts? The accelerated pace of print production in the last two centuries resulted in a tidal wave of these media, presenting scholars with unique challenges concerning authorship, ownership, preservation and interpretation.
The promises and challenges of scrapbook research deserve closer examination in light of today’s boom in social media. For the student of media and culture, paging through a personal scrapbook is not unlike clicking through the features of a Facebook user’s profile. Both media provide unique windows into people’s thoughts and personal lives. They represent, as Tucker et al. (2006: 18) put it, ‘culture makers with their guard down’. But these sites, and the wealth of personal data that they contain, also carry their own textual vexations for scholars. Is there any ‘right’ way to ‘read’ these messy pages? This essay addresses this question by bringing recent studies on scrapbooks into dialogue with the emergent field of social media research. While scrapbooks are commonly understood as private hobbyist creations, and Facebook as a site of public and social interaction, here I draw from a range of studies that call attention to the fluidly social and archival dimensions of each form. By reviewing research on these two technologies, my aim is not to suggest a causal link between them, but instead to show historical continuities in the public and private practices they have promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers.
This is not the first study to suggest a similarity between scrapbooks and social media. Historians have likened scrapbooks to personal web pages and online photo albums, and it is common to encounter websites and software programs that play on the idea of the ‘digital scrapbook’ (Helfand, 2008; mixbook.com; scrapgirls.com; smilebox.com). But, to my knowledge, the emergent phenomenon of social media has not yet been analyzed as a continuation of earlier scrapbooking habits, nor have historical scrapbooks been examined as forms of proto-social media. This study defines ‘scrapbooks’ as physical books in which paper scraps and other items are saved; however, it also highlights the often blurry distinctions between scrapbooks and other social/archival media traditions, such as autograph, photograph and confession albums, and commonplace books (Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 27–36, 65; 2009). A number of contemporary social media platforms could be analyzed as digital carryovers of these traditions, including Twitter, Myspace, Flickr and Pinterest. This study focuses on Facebook as the paradigmatic site of contemporary social media use, because it both boasts larger membership (at the time of writing, over 900 million users) than any other social network site and is a predominant object and site of social media research. By drawing out this parallel between scrapbooks and Facebook, my aim is not to propose a ‘history of Facebook’, but rather to offer an historicization of it and similar media platforms − a way of thinking about today’s social media practices as entrenched in a long history of habits and hobbies by which people interacted with media texts to both express themselves socially and, simultaneously, to document their lives.
While scrapbooks and Facebook are different in multiple and fundamental ways, beginning with the simple fact that the scrapbook is an analog book-based medium and Facebook is a digital one birthed on the Internet, at least two aspects of their form make them comparable. First, a key shared feature is their containment of − and formal dependence on − diverse streams of personal content. In particular, each medium acts as a place for users to create and post what I will call personal media assemblages: individualized collections of media fragments both original and appropriated, including notes, messages, photographs, symbolic tokens, and snippets of meaningful items. In historical scrapbooks, personal media assemblages typically include newspaper clippings, magazine cutouts, correspondence, stamps, stickers, food wrappers, ticket stubs, photographs, doodles, signatures, pressed flowers and other mementos. In the digital domain of Facebook, personal media assemblages include posted photos, videos, applications, links to external media and personal interests, ‘gifts’, ‘notes’, ‘questions’, messages and status updates. It is important to point out that in both scrapbooks and Facebook, owners are not necessarily the only ones producing or annotating content in their personal media assemblages. The flexibility of each format permits friends, family and other contacts to directly inscribe their own artifacts onto other people’s pages, provided that they are granted access by the owner. While this may be an obvious observation of Facebook, where a user’s ‘wall’ is typically filled with comments and objects posted by friends, a long history of this form of collaborative and creative communication is also evidenced in scrapbooks, which, from their earliest versions, were commonly passed among groups of friends and inscribed by multiple users (Matthews, 2000; Tucker et al., 2006: 7; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 30–31).
In addition to providing a setting in which users can creatively assemble content, both scrapbooks and Facebook also serve as reservoirs for that content. This leads to a second formal commonality between the two technologies: both are personal media archives, or sites that house personal media assemblages within a bounded setting, with options for both private viewing and public display. In general, archiving is an activity with which scrapbooks are more strongly identified than Facebook. The archival aspect of scrapbooks has long been of interest to scholars, but it has only recently emerged as a theme in social media research (Garde-Hansen, 2009; Hogan, 2010; Zboray and Zboray, 2009). This can be explained, first, by differences in the technologies’ material makeup and histories of use. Variations of scrapbooks have been around for several centuries, evolving from the book and other mass print technologies, making them more readily regarded as archival objects. Facebook, on the other hand, is an amalgam of relatively recent developments in digital communication such as the weblog, asynchronous messaging, news feeds and the personal webpage, making it much more intelligible as an arena of everyday communication than an archive of accumulated activities (Cox, 2009; Hogan, 2010).
Furthermore, both popular and scholarly discourses tend to describe Facebook as a site for social, not archival, activity. By most accounts, the primary function of Facebook is social network maintenance, or keeping in touch with one’s social ties (boyd and Ellison, 2007; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008). For this reason, most studies on Facebook are interested in its associated social activities − how users post, view, retrieve and interpret each other’s information as forms of online interaction, identity construction and performance, and computer-mediated communication. As for the resultant rising sea of user data and social performances that Facebook captures, scholars tend to analyze these as the secondary fruits of the site’s primarily communicative architecture. But given the countless creative hours that users spend on Facebook consuming, posting and re-posting items reflecting their interests and experiences, is it sufficient to continue approaching it as a site solely for social interaction and relationship maintenance?
Some have suggested that we update our understanding of sites like Facebook as not only arenas of social activity, but also as expanding archives of personal artifacts. As Hogan (2010) argues, the accumulation of users’ public traces online has become an undeniable byproduct of increasing social media use, one that poses mounting implications for self-presentation in the digital age. Hogan observes that presenting oneself online through social media differs from offline communication in that it is not a targeted ‘performance’, bounded in space and time, but more of an open-ended ‘exhibition’. On websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, one user’s posts may pop up in another’s search or news feed in ways that the first user cannot fully anticipate, regardless of their deployment of privacy controls. Hogan likens users’ uploading of content to a handing over of their personal artifacts, a relinquishing of control over their online self-presentation to a third-party ‘curator’, such as an algorithm or server, which has the power to reconfigure their submission(s) in unexpected and unintended ways.
The metaphor of Facebook as an exhibition hall calls attention not only to the simultaneously social and archival capacities of the medium, but also the structural and corporate mechanisms that shape how the archive is assembled, maintained and made accessible to different users, algorithms and publics (Derrida, 1995). Whereas scrapbooks tend to be discrete objects created and owned by individuals, Facebook is an institutionalized archive co-created by users, Facebook Inc., and third-party applications or ‘apps’ (Garde-Hansen, 2009: 137). Hence while scrapbooks and Facebook are generally comparable as sites of personal media assemblage and archives, it is important to note the different levels of control that they afford to users. Compared to today’s social media users, scrapbookers have historically enjoyed greater authorial direction over the arrangement and display of their objects. Unconstrained by specific categories of input, they could paste a photo or scrawl a message anywhere within the confines of the page. Moreover, as long as they were in possession of their scrapbooks, they could also control the degree to which their personal media assemblages were put on public display. Facebook, in contrast, boasts far greater networked connectivity and accommodates a staggering variety of digital multimedia content (e.g. video, photos, chat and games), but its communicative superpowers come at a significant cost to users in terms of privacy and control. Whereas the scrapbook owners of yesteryear could not attach videos or instantaneously correspond with distant friends on the pages of their books, they could stow their personal media assemblages out of public view until the desired audience came along. In short, today’s social media users enjoy a host of communicative capabilities, but their personal media assemblages are shaped by and ultimately belong to the sites that host them.
While scrapbooks and social media sites differ significantly in their capacity for user communication and control, they are similar in other important ways. Having signaled their formal similarities − as locations of personal media assemblage and archives − the rest of this essay will highlight three specific functions that they share by drawing from existing research on both technologies. First, both scrapbooks and Facebook have developed as sites in which users document friendship and visualize their social networks. Second, both provide tools and spaces to help users navigate periods of new media abundance. Finally, both provide platforms for the accumulation of cultural capital through the expression of class distinctions and personal taste.
Comparing these ‘old’ and ‘new’ media technologies by way of their shared functions is important, on one level, for shedding historical light on social media use, which is widely approached as a novel phenomenon with no cultural precedent. Furthermore, by highlighting the historically fluid boundaries between archival and ‘social’ media, this study advances the view that a wide variety of personal media practices can be seen as promoting a range of simultaneously documentary and performative behaviors. Social media sites, which are predominantly recognized as social and interactive arenas, can be compared with scrapbooks because they also have private and archival functions that scholars are only beginning to explore. Correspondingly, scrapbooks, which are commonly viewed as private objects with hobbyist or archival aims, appear also to have helped users perform specific social and performative tasks in the past.