I've just been reading an entry at Media Studies 2.0 entitled "MySpace and Legendary Psychasthenia" and while I generally like his blog quite a bit, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of what William was writing and his methods of argument. Essentially, the essay bemoans a loss of "individuality" in our subjective immigration to online social networks. This is an argument that has been heard before, and one that does have some valuable claims, but ultimately the entry fails to properly account for the multiplicity of subjective interaction and archivization via online social networks. And by thus mistaking the global for the local and vice-versa, it's tough to give the point much weight.

The piece begins by setting up a spuriously dichotomous thesis: "I want to suggest that Myspace, Facebook and their ilk represent, not a flowering of self and individuality but its psychasthenic absorption, renunciation and loss." In this situation online social networks can have one of two effects: a "flowering of self and individuality" or "psychasthenic absorption, renunciation and loss." Defining these as the two subjective potentialities for these new media is almost ridiculous. Should anyone take seriously claims that these media could do either? Generally, I dismiss both the most dire and the most optimistic assessments of online social networks for what they are: hyperbole.

Secondly, neither in the thesis nor in the body of the essay is "individuality" properly defined or contextualized. Is it merely the difference of definable characteristics between individual subjects? Must actions of social conformity be viewed as undesirable? Do they not allow us to have a functional society in the first place? To use the term "individuality" in such a decontextualized, more-is-better manner is really to ascribe to a vague and misleading ideology of personal gratification, fueled by a healthy dose of egotism.

The body of the essay often refers to users of MySpace and Facebook as though they use one and only one of these services at the exclusion of the other and any other socio-archival web-based media. Despite citing Sherry Turkle's cogent and convincing defense of a multiple and distributed online self, William goes on to ignore it an focus entirely on a user's individual profile on one of the two major online social networks, and thus drawing questionable conclusions about online subjectivity: "The self is set free as a profile, fixed to another point – to a non-space existing only as proprietal code within an electronic network – and subsequently lost to us."

Within this sentence the following assumptions are made: (1) subjective tendrils, once created, are entirely divorced from their creator; (2) online social networks are a "non-space"; and that (3) our online self is thus "lost to us." The first assumption falls into the trap that many writing about online identity fall into - the idea that when we turn off our computer that we have severed ties to the actions we have just performed. We interact on these networks long after we cease to alter our profiles, just look at the phenomenon of online graveyards and death-centric social networks. Yes these are simulacra, but they continue to signify as subjective proxies for us after we have moved on in one way or another. A profile has not been "set-free" but retains as much a connection to its creator as anything we create does if not more so on account of its personal-representational mode. Just because it exists on a server somewhere does not imply that we have somehow lost ownership or subjective links.

The second assumption, that online social networks are a "non-space," requires quite a leap. The idea that online social networks should be considered within the realm of "space" at all is merely a rhetorical and metaphorical construction to begin with. This is the familiar ideology of "cyberspace" - which is actually used several times in the essay - an ideology that began in science fiction novels and has been used to conceptualize a series of new media that did not fit easily into any other boxes we might have. On top of this, the term is used in an inexplicably derogatory manner. Even if this was a non-space, the reason why this serves to divorce or homogenize networked subjectivity goes unexplained.

The third assumption is merely the result of the first two. Certainly if we were to actually be setting little chunks of our identity "free" in a "non-space," we'd be at a loss. The fact is however that we never manage to lose our subjective tendrils online, and when you consider (as William does not) the multiplicity of venues for subjective in/dividuation and construction and the fact that many of these tendrils continue to exist and thrive in a networked-archival environment - it seem like we actually are seeing exactly what Turkle describes.

That said, the essay does hit on some key points, and William's analysis of interaction through online social networks as perpetual semiotic (or affective, I might suggest) labor is spot on - even if he doesn't apply it to a multiple-subjective environment. For these reasons - and for the sake of debate - I do recommend this essay.