Framing Female Visibility Through Facebook

The readings we’ve perused this week have addressed the impact of new media on self-branding and the drawbacks and advantages of the internet for women in general, but there was one issue that wasn’t entirely covered which I feel deserves closer analysis in terms of female visibility on the internet and the function of social media in self-promotion and self-branding.

This article: http://thoughtcatalog.com/brianne-garcia/2012/02/how-facebook-has-changed-the-way-young-girls-view-themselves/ provides some relevant food for thought on the ways in which social media websites such as facebook have irreparably changed the way women and young girls view themselves and project their image to the world. On a personal level this article really resonated with me and emphasized just how almost imperceptible this aesthetic shift has been and yet how widespread it has now become within social media practices for female users. Especially for teenagers and young adults, the culture of visibility, judgment, and body image comparison that facebook promotes can be deeply problematic and makes it ever more difficult to escape notions of women as objects of a gaze – this time, an invisible user’s gaze. Moreover, as the article argues, this newfound internet visibility encourages young women to spend time intuitively learning how to ‘pose’ for pictures at social events which they know will end up online afterwards. Discourses of ‘tagging’, ‘detagging’, how many likes certain images get (and from whom), and time spent building up one’s profile and selecting profile and cover images can act not only as self-branding as a commodity but as markers of an identity we choose to present to others. This problematic dynamic can lead to reductive identity formation and a delicate conceptualization of how one is publicly ‘consumed’ by millions of users online. In an era where people are able to ‘research’ others through social media websites for every possible reason from personal investigation for potential partners to employers looking to check-up on future employees, online identity construction via social media has become disturbingly significant in both private and public spaces.

In light of the above, it is worth questioning how far we have been able to distance ourselves from Mulvey’s conceptualization of ‘the gaze’ and just to what degree the internet can be considered liberating and empowering if it also enables discourses of visibility that can encourage the kinds of restrictive self-regulatory practices that feminism aims to curb.

Essentially, in the debate about whether feminism can benefit from the prevalence of new media and the internet, this is a strand that seems to have been somewhat sidestepped, but it remains very much a pervasive phenomenon that deserves renewed attention and analysis.