Recently, an old friend posted a photo of the ice cream parlor crew of summer '01, of which I was a part. The boy I had started dating in the middle of my freshman year of college and I had decided to work at an amusement park over the summer so that we could be together; our friend had worked there during previous summers and she sold us on the idea. All three of us: me, the boy, and our friend are in the photo, along with most of the other regular workers, including the old friend who posted this picture and who tagged me in it. Upon receiving a notification that I'd been tagged in a photo, I clicked to see which photo of me this old friend could have tagged; we had interacted in person as coworkers for one summer at the park, but have only kept in touch very infrequently since that summer through email and more recently through myspace and facebook. When I saw the picture, I marveled at the memory - I was only 19 or so, my first summer as a college student.
The boy and I had a tumultuous relationship that ended in a series of two really terrible breakups, followed by some sustained drama which eventually evened out into ambivalence. When I saw his listing on facebook about a year ago, I sent a friend request. He accepted, and we've exchanged several relatively mundane messages, mostly the facebook usual for people you haven't talked to in years, maybe even decades.
I tagged him in the picture. When I went back and looked at the picture later, he had untagged himself. He told me that it was nothing personal, that he had a lot of professional contacts on facebook and he didn't want them to see him in that ugly shirt with that stupid nametag on. This seems pretty reasonable unless you've looked at his pictures; he has a pretty good amount, many of which are publicly viewable and more than a couple that don't exactly exude 'professionalism'.
This is an illustration of how people construct their identities on SNS; users are able to choose how their identities are presented to their audience. To prevent those who might browse his photos from seeing that picture, the user detached his electronic identity from the artifact. However, a user's ability to effectively manage her or his identity is also contingent on how frequently they log in. Depending on one's privacy settings, when someone is tagged in a photo, a story is often published about it on News Feed. Since News Feed is arguably the place where facebook users absorb the most information about one another because it is readily available and made convenient for consumption, college-boyfriend's facebook audience was more likely to be aware that I tagged him in a picture immediately after I had done so than at any other time during that photo's existence online. Him untagging himself prevents future viewers of his profile from seeing the picture, but if he didn't log on for several hours after the tagging, people were able to click on the mini-story as it scrolled by throughout the day to see our smiling, pre-hating-each-other faces tilted together, both of us clothed in those horrible, thin, rough cotton shirts that always smelt of sour milk.
:)
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