testify, sistah!

In dana boyd's article “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites,” she describes the evolution of comment sections on social network profiles. Profile comments first appeared on Friendster, a social networking site that originated as a place to meet potential dates. They took the form of Testimonials, in which friends would write about the person on whose profile they were posting, adding to the information the user had already provided about his or herself. She gives the following true example of a Testimonial: “Mark is a man among boys, a razor sharp mind towering over the general sludge” (7). boyd (you can tell she's a real digital media professor by her refusal to submit to capitalization) describes how it became common for users to write testimonials back and forth to each other. This tendency led MySpace to name its comment area simply Comments. Along with The Wall of Facebook fame, these spaces became less about comments and more about inane chatty conversations. The example boyd gives: “Are we still gonna go paintballing?”

Clearly, these spaces are no longer exclusively for offering tribute to your friends. What are they for then? First off, they appear to be a way to show off your friendships. By publicly having the type of unimportant conversation you would usually have with your closest friends, you provide evidence to the world of your close relationship with the person on whose wall you are posting. You can see this effect at work in the informal Comments fans leave on a band's MySpace profile, simply saying things like “great show last night!!!!!1 lolz” These type of posts suggest a close relationship that may or may not exist offline.

Additionally, when you post on someone's wall, there is the expectation that that person post back on your wall, boosting your own wall post count. Unlike simply having a lot of Friends, post counts in the 1000s show that your friends actually like you enough to write to you, inferring popularity/coolness. In a sense, The Wall has become a Testimonial to yourself.


-Gene and Dylan