UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

And ―[s]ince anybody can establish friendship with any stranger, the definition of what a real
friend means on Facebook is disoriented.‖ 333 Yet it still does not seem that the nature of
communication has changed all that much. As Boyd maintains, ―[m]ost people are simply logging
in to hang out with friends that they already know [...] Not surprisingly, offline or online,
gossiping is far more common and interesting than voting.‖ 334 This last statement is interesting in
view of the problematic of Yugoslav politics of memory in Facebook: Are the
administrators/owners and visitors engaged in co-creation of a narrative ‗really‘ on a mission to
renovate the deceased country (as is often at least implicitly manifest)? Or is this rather an on-thefly
hanging out where users arbitrarily post/comment on the stuff that they stumble upon? What in
all this is the role of memory and remembering?
The ‗history‘ of user engagement, particularly when it comes to tracking the past, is practically
untraceable. Although a compressed file of an almost entire history of one‘s Facebook
engagement can be downloaded, this only presents one side of the story. The other part is in some
friend‘s profile and practically unobtainable, unless agreed by the person in question to share it.
This effectively renders Facebook extremely ephemeral as ‗repository of memory‘ and further
testifies to its on-the-fly-ness and to the radical transitoriness of a record of a relationship. What
remains to be done, it seems, is browsing through the older posts hitting the back button: the
problem is that when the user clicks through to older posts, they load into one successive string of
posts and any navigation from this sometimes extremely long list brings the ‗historian‘ back to the
starting point: the most recent page of posts.
This, as already explained above, poses considerable problems when attempting to research any
activity over a longer period of time (unless deliberately traced and recorded). It is for this reason
that I have decided to design my analysis so that it only includes content available without any
intervention of the owner of the profile. In other words, I focus, on-the-fly, on whatever content is
available in the final research period. This approach seems best suited also in the context of
approaching a profile as a 4MO: the posted content is often very ‗fresh‘ yet in many cases the use
of remediated content (films and music) establishes a relation to the past at the same time as a
connection is created between the temporarily and spatially remote users. With regards to the
‗impossible history‘ of a relationship on Facebook this radically alters the characteristics of
333 David Adelman, ―Anthropology Behind Facebook,‖ http://www.helium.com/items/1452870-facebook-interviewanthropology,
created 18 May 2009, accessed 24 August 2011.
334 Danah Boyd, ―Can social networking sites enable political action,‖ in Allison Fine, Micah Sifry, Andrew Raseij
and Josh Levi (eds.), Rebooting America, New York, Creative Commons, 2008, 112-116, 115.
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