From scrapbook to Facebook: A history of personal media assemblage and archives

Abstract

This study surveys recent research on print-era scrapbooks and contemporary social media to highlight commonalities between the two formats, both in terms of the practices they have historically promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers. It argues that scrapbooks and social media can be conceptualized as sites of personal media assemblage and personal media archives, a designation that highlights the simultaneously social and archival dimensions of each form. After discussing these formal similarities, the author identifies three shared functions: (1) documenting friendship, (2) navigating new media abundance, and (3) communicating taste and building cultural capital. By drawing functional and formal parallels between the two media, the goal is to observe how these ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies might mutually shed light on each other’s neglected social and archival dimensions, offering scholars a wider range of angles from which to approach them as cultural and biographical texts.

Keywords

Archive assemblage biography culture ephemera Facebook history new media scrapbook social media

Introduction

For scholars studying Facebook and other social media, some recent research about a much older medium − the print-era scrapbook − might sound surprisingly familiar. Like social media profiles, scrapbooks are deeply social texts. They are packed with personal information but are also problematic. As objects that were both popular and marginal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scrapbooks have sparked dialogues among cultural historians, literary scholars and archivists over how to extract meaning from them (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008; Tucker et al., 2006; Zboray and Zboray, 2009). The trouble with scrapbooks can be broken down into three broad categories that are relevant to studies of social media. A primary concern is about the validity of the scrapbook as a historical or biographical text (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008). Scrapbooks are rarely edited, nor are they ‘finished’ like formal publications. Instead they are messy, fragmentary and highly individualized. Scrapbooks have not achieved the ‘official’ or authoritative status of published media like newspapers or books; rather, they tend to be personal collections of ephemera that are themselves ephemeral (Tucker et al., 2006: 18). Second, it is unclear what kinds of functions scrapbooks served for their users in the past. Were they mostly private objects for storing thoughts and memories, as is commonly assumed, or did they also serve a more immediate and social purpose? Finally, how should scholars approach scrapbooks as personal archives and historical artifacts? The accelerated pace of print production in the last two centuries resulted in a tidal wave of these media, presenting scholars with unique challenges concerning authorship, ownership, preservation and interpretation.

The promises and challenges of scrapbook research deserve closer examination in light of today’s boom in social media. For the student of media and culture, paging through a personal scrapbook is not unlike clicking through the features of a Facebook user’s profile. Both media provide unique windows into people’s thoughts and personal lives. They represent, as Tucker et al. (2006: 18) put it, ‘culture makers with their guard down’. But these sites, and the wealth of personal data that they contain, also carry their own textual vexations for scholars. Is there any ‘right’ way to ‘read’ these messy pages? This essay addresses this question by bringing recent studies on scrapbooks into dialogue with the emergent field of social media research. While scrapbooks are commonly understood as private hobbyist creations, and Facebook as a site of public and social interaction, here I draw from a range of studies that call attention to the fluidly social and archival dimensions of each form. By reviewing research on these two technologies, my aim is not to suggest a causal link between them, but instead to show historical continuities in the public and private practices they have promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers.

This is not the first study to suggest a similarity between scrapbooks and social media. Historians have likened scrapbooks to personal web pages and online photo albums, and it is common to encounter websites and software programs that play on the idea of the ‘digital scrapbook’ (Helfand, 2008; mixbook.com; scrapgirls.com; smilebox.com). But, to my knowledge, the emergent phenomenon of social media has not yet been analyzed as a continuation of earlier scrapbooking habits, nor have historical scrapbooks been examined as forms of proto-social media. This study defines ‘scrapbooks’ as physical books in which paper scraps and other items are saved; however, it also highlights the often blurry distinctions between scrapbooks and other social/archival media traditions, such as autograph, photograph and confession albums, and commonplace books (Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 27–36, 65; 2009). A number of contemporary social media platforms could be analyzed as digital carryovers of these traditions, including Twitter, Myspace, Flickr and Pinterest. This study focuses on Facebook as the paradigmatic site of contemporary social media use, because it both boasts larger membership (at the time of writing, over 900 million users) than any other social network site and is a predominant object and site of social media research. By drawing out this parallel between scrapbooks and Facebook, my aim is not to propose a ‘history of Facebook’, but rather to offer an historicization of it and similar media platforms − a way of thinking about today’s social media practices as entrenched in a long history of habits and hobbies by which people interacted with media texts to both express themselves socially and, simultaneously, to document their lives.

Formal comparisons

While scrapbooks and Facebook are different in multiple and fundamental ways, beginning with the simple fact that the scrapbook is an analog book-based medium and Facebook is a digital one birthed on the Internet, at least two aspects of their form make them comparable. First, a key shared feature is their containment of − and formal dependence on − diverse streams of personal content. In particular, each medium acts as a place for users to create and post what I will call personal media assemblages: individualized collections of media fragments both original and appropriated, including notes, messages, photographs, symbolic tokens, and snippets of meaningful items. In historical scrapbooks, personal media assemblages typically include newspaper clippings, magazine cutouts, correspondence, stamps, stickers, food wrappers, ticket stubs, photographs, doodles, signatures, pressed flowers and other mementos. In the digital domain of Facebook, personal media assemblages include posted photos, videos, applications, links to external media and personal interests, ‘gifts’, ‘notes’, ‘questions’, messages and status updates. It is important to point out that in both scrapbooks and Facebook, owners are not necessarily the only ones producing or annotating content in their personal media assemblages. The flexibility of each format permits friends, family and other contacts to directly inscribe their own artifacts onto other people’s pages, provided that they are granted access by the owner. While this may be an obvious observation of Facebook, where a user’s ‘wall’ is typically filled with comments and objects posted by friends, a long history of this form of collaborative and creative communication is also evidenced in scrapbooks, which, from their earliest versions, were commonly passed among groups of friends and inscribed by multiple users (Matthews, 2000; Tucker et al., 2006: 7; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 30–31).

In addition to providing a setting in which users can creatively assemble content, both scrapbooks and Facebook also serve as reservoirs for that content. This leads to a second formal commonality between the two technologies: both are personal media archives, or sites that house personal media assemblages within a bounded setting, with options for both private viewing and public display. In general, archiving is an activity with which scrapbooks are more strongly identified than Facebook. The archival aspect of scrapbooks has long been of interest to scholars, but it has only recently emerged as a theme in social media research (Garde-Hansen, 2009; Hogan, 2010; Zboray and Zboray, 2009). This can be explained, first, by differences in the technologies’ material makeup and histories of use. Variations of scrapbooks have been around for several centuries, evolving from the book and other mass print technologies, making them more readily regarded as archival objects. Facebook, on the other hand, is an amalgam of relatively recent developments in digital communication such as the weblog, asynchronous messaging, news feeds and the personal webpage, making it much more intelligible as an arena of everyday communication than an archive of accumulated activities (Cox, 2009; Hogan, 2010).

Furthermore, both popular and scholarly discourses tend to describe Facebook as a site for social, not archival, activity. By most accounts, the primary function of Facebook is social network maintenance, or keeping in touch with one’s social ties (boyd and Ellison, 2007; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008). For this reason, most studies on Facebook are interested in its associated social activities − how users post, view, retrieve and interpret each other’s information as forms of online interaction, identity construction and performance, and computer-mediated communication. As for the resultant rising sea of user data and social performances that Facebook captures, scholars tend to analyze these as the secondary fruits of the site’s primarily communicative architecture. But given the countless creative hours that users spend on Facebook consuming, posting and re-posting items reflecting their interests and experiences, is it sufficient to continue approaching it as a site solely for social interaction and relationship maintenance?

Some have suggested that we update our understanding of sites like Facebook as not only arenas of social activity, but also as expanding archives of personal artifacts. As Hogan (2010) argues, the accumulation of users’ public traces online has become an undeniable byproduct of increasing social media use, one that poses mounting implications for self-presentation in the digital age. Hogan observes that presenting oneself online through social media differs from offline communication in that it is not a targeted ‘performance’, bounded in space and time, but more of an open-ended ‘exhibition’. On websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, one user’s posts may pop up in another’s search or news feed in ways that the first user cannot fully anticipate, regardless of their deployment of privacy controls. Hogan likens users’ uploading of content to a handing over of their personal artifacts, a relinquishing of control over their online self-presentation to a third-party ‘curator’, such as an algorithm or server, which has the power to reconfigure their submission(s) in unexpected and unintended ways.

The metaphor of Facebook as an exhibition hall calls attention not only to the simultaneously social and archival capacities of the medium, but also the structural and corporate mechanisms that shape how the archive is assembled, maintained and made accessible to different users, algorithms and publics (Derrida, 1995). Whereas scrapbooks tend to be discrete objects created and owned by individuals, Facebook is an institutionalized archive co-created by users, Facebook Inc., and third-party applications or ‘apps’ (Garde-Hansen, 2009: 137). Hence while scrapbooks and Facebook are generally comparable as sites of personal media assemblage and archives, it is important to note the different levels of control that they afford to users. Compared to today’s social media users, scrapbookers have historically enjoyed greater authorial direction over the arrangement and display of their objects. Unconstrained by specific categories of input, they could paste a photo or scrawl a message anywhere within the confines of the page. Moreover, as long as they were in possession of their scrapbooks, they could also control the degree to which their personal media assemblages were put on public display. Facebook, in contrast, boasts far greater networked connectivity and accommodates a staggering variety of digital multimedia content (e.g. video, photos, chat and games), but its communicative superpowers come at a significant cost to users in terms of privacy and control. Whereas the scrapbook owners of yesteryear could not attach videos or instantaneously correspond with distant friends on the pages of their books, they could stow their personal media assemblages out of public view until the desired audience came along. In short, today’s social media users enjoy a host of communicative capabilities, but their personal media assemblages are shaped by and ultimately belong to the sites that host them.

Functional comparisons

While scrapbooks and social media sites differ significantly in their capacity for user communication and control, they are similar in other important ways. Having signaled their formal similarities − as locations of personal media assemblage and archives − the rest of this essay will highlight three specific functions that they share by drawing from existing research on both technologies. First, both scrapbooks and Facebook have developed as sites in which users document friendship and visualize their social networks. Second, both provide tools and spaces to help users navigate periods of new media abundance. Finally, both provide platforms for the accumulation of cultural capital through the expression of class distinctions and personal taste.

Comparing these ‘old’ and ‘new’ media technologies by way of their shared functions is important, on one level, for shedding historical light on social media use, which is widely approached as a novel phenomenon with no cultural precedent. Furthermore, by highlighting the historically fluid boundaries between archival and ‘social’ media, this study advances the view that a wide variety of personal media practices can be seen as promoting a range of simultaneously documentary and performative behaviors. Social media sites, which are predominantly recognized as social and interactive arenas, can be compared with scrapbooks because they also have private and archival functions that scholars are only beginning to explore. Correspondingly, scrapbooks, which are commonly viewed as private objects with hobbyist or archival aims, appear also to have helped users perform specific social and performative tasks in the past.

Documenting friendship

A core function of both scrapbooks and Facebook is the documentation of friendship. Facebook is a specific kind of social medium known as a ‘social network site’ (SNS), a term defined by boyd and Ellison (2007) to distinguish it from the more widely used label, ‘social networking site’. The authors note that the main purpose of a SNS is not to ‘network’ or meet strangers, but rather to ‘enable users to articulate and make visible their existing social networks’ (2007: 211). The majority of contacts on SNS are between users who already have some sort of offline relationship.¹ In addition to creating textual links between real-life connections, Facebook makes the social experience perusable, like pages in a book, by providing a structure and setting for users to ‘view and traverse’ their social links. boyd and Ellison define SNS as ‘web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (2007: 211). In short, a core function of SNS is to visualize relationships in the user’s extended social network. In this respect, scrapbooks and their predecessors appear to have anticipated SNS as many as four centuries ago.

A forerunner to the scrapbook was the album amicorum or ‘friendship book’ (known in German as the Stammbuch, or ‘register of acquaintances’) (Tucker et al., 2006: 7). From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the primary users of these books were male aristocratic university students who traveled Europe for their intellectual training. Students used the album amicorum to keep an illustrated record of their encounters with other students and professors. But unlike a directory or diary, the album amicorum was an intrinsically social medium − it was the contacts themselves who left their mark in the owner’s book. A typical page would feature an illustration or pre-inscribed verse in Latin, Greek or Hebrew. In the blank space provided, a friend would inscribe a personalized greeting or dedication to the album’s owner, often accompanied by a commissioned illustration in the form of a heraldic shield or small ‘emblem’ (Rosenthal, 2009: 622). As on Facebook today, friends could convey their personal touch through a reference to some other form of popular media − a motto, a poetic verse or a short epigram. The books’ ornate illustrations and witty, multi-authored phrases suggest that they were not meant solely for private documentation, but for social circulation, sharing and display. Each album is a unique aggregation of exchanged inscriptions and emblems, yielding what Rosenthal (2009: 620) calls ‘a portrait of friends and personal experiences that form a communal self for posterity’.

With the expansion of print technologies and the migration of European groups to the western hemisphere, friendship books flourished in American culture in the early nineteenth century. Known most widely as autograph albums, these recreational items ranged from commercially produced blank books with embossed covers to hand-bound cardboard constructions made at home. Like their European predecessors, the books were regarded as deeply social objects: by the mid 1800s, the word ‘album’ referred to any blank book in which friends left ‘memorials’ to one another (Vosmeier, 2006: 208). As Tucker et al. (2006: 7) note, ‘the friendship album was a place for inscribing autographs, poetry, prose, and wishes from friends’, where the contents often ‘combined mass-produced sources and friends’ words and autographs’. Many used albums to mix textual and visual tokens, including cartes de visite, the small calling cards left behind by contacts after a social visit (Milne, 2004). Other ‘memorials’ included homegrown items like pressed flowers and locks of hair. Vosmeier (2006: 208–209) notes that such tokens were not considered valuable in their own right; rather, they were prized for their social associations with a certain person, place or shared memory. Soon after photography arrived on the consumer market in the 1860s, many users opted to replace those textual-material tokens of friendship with modern photographs. But even as the materials in users’ personal media assemblages evolved over time, what remained constant was their value as symbols of social bonds.

These early forms of scrapbooks are striking in their resemblance to online SNS. By no means, of course, did the album amicorum or autograph album anticipate the level of social connectivity and surveillance currently afforded by websites like Facebook. However, friendship books can be understood as early forms of social media insofar as they were constituted by acts of social exchange and collaborative inscription. Echoes of the album amicorum and autograph albums are still observable today on Facebook ‘walls’, where friends can post messages, personalize links to photographs and other media, or give an emblematic ‘gift’. Indeed, the circulation of friendship books permitted many of the basic functions of SNS outlined by boyd and Ellison (2007). It allowed participants to construct public or semi-public ‘profiles’ within a bounded system (e.g. personalized inscriptions in each other’s books), to document and visualize their real-life contacts, and to ‘view and traverse’ those contacts by flipping through the pages (2007: 211).

The similarity between friendship books and Facebook is further underscored by the fact that the emergence of both media practices was driven significantly by students (Helfand, 2008: 113-116; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008; Vosmeier, 2006: 212). From the sixteenth century to the present, students have relied on variations of the flexible ‘blank book’ to record the friendships and fleeting encounters of their school days. Yet although friendship books and Facebook initially flourished through youth practices of exchange in educational settings, neither format remained limited to students or to textual inscriptions for long. With the growth of new media markets and technologies, each social medium evolved, expanded and merged with other practices to include not only textual markers of friendship between students, but other forms of media exchange as well. Much in the same way as autograph albums evolved to include other media in the late nineteenth century, Facebook expanded from Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a ‘simple’ social directory for college students into a more capacious arena for sharing multiple types of media among users of different age groups (Cassidy, 2006). Since the addition of the photo application in 2005, the news feed and extension of membership to non-students in 2006, various third-party applications in 2007, and the ‘timeline’ in 2011, Facebook has become a multigenerational and multimedia depot where a wealth of personalized texts, images and videos are exchanged daily between hundreds of millions of users of different ages and backgrounds. Indeed, the diversification of Facebook’s capabilities amid an accelerating Internet culture is reminiscent of the proliferation of scrapbooks in the late nineteenth century, in which the predominantly textual traditions of friendship albums, commonplace books and literary scrapbooks converged with the explosion of popular print media.

Navigating new media abundance

In 1872, over 130 years before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook with classmates at Harvard University, Samuel Clemens secured a patent for ‘Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook’ (Kaplan, 1991: 150). Like many of his contemporaries, Twain spent a lot of time reading newspapers and magazines, and often wanted to save articles for personal and professional reuse. Frustrated by the hassle and mess of paste, Twain invented a scrapbook with pre-glued paper. The product’s ‘ready gummed pages’ came in various layouts, designed to quickly adhere scraps from newspapers and other printed media sources (Garvey, 2004: 215). The fact that Twain saw a market for such an invention is indicative of the tremendous growth in ephemeral print matter in his day. Much as today’s media consumers rely on social media to ‘filter’ content from the expanding world of online information, in the mid to late nineteenth century scrapbooks served as handy social tools for helping consumers navigate new waves of print abundance (Garvey, 2004: 209).² In the mid nineteenth century, scrapbooking was a predominantly literary pastime enjoyed by members of the middle and upper classes, who avidly collected and saved snippets of reading material for future reference or recirculation. Scrapbooking was shaped in many ways by the tradition of keeping commonplace books (also known as ‘extract’ books), in which users hand-copied passages of interest from books and periodicals to help them keep track of information or make intelligent references in letters or conversations (Garvey, 2004: 211; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 31). The popularity of scrapbooking surged with the rise of ephemeral printed texts and visuals in the late nineteenth century, following developments in steam-powered printing, embossing, chromolithography and railway transport (Casper et al., 2007). In response to this influx of cheap, colorful printed material, more people began saving scraps − including newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, trade cards, pictures from catalogues, even food wrappers − to exchange with their friends or keep for themselves.

By the late nineteenth century, scrapbooking was shifting from a predominantly textual to a more visual practice, prompting new synergies between scrapbook creators and the burgeoning consumer culture. As Garvey (2006b) points out, manufacturers and retailers were quick to capitalize on users’ desires for colorful scraps, printing chromolithographed trade cards with brand names accompanied by illustrations of products, flowers and birds. Trade cards were often identical in design to prayer cards and calling cards, making it easy for users to mingle advertisements with other kinds of social texts in the pages of their scrapbooks (Garvey, 2006b: 98). This dovetailing of brand dissemination with the social and educational traditions of scrapbooking is prescient of the ‘social marketing’ tactics employed by advertisers on social media sites today. In the last few years, many companies have started producing social media-oriented advertising texts (e.g. ‘themed’ product boards on Pinterest, corporate ‘fan’ pages on Facebook, or brand-related hashtag phrases on Twitter) in an effort to be ‘liked’, ‘shared’, ‘retweeted’ or ‘repinned’ by users who spend time and socialize in these online spaces. Thus, while scrapbooks and Facebook evidence a long history of users creatively responding to new waves of available media, they also reveal a similarly enduring tendency of market capitalism to both provide the source material for and attempt to profit from such practices.

The collusion between commodity capitalism and scrapbooking is perhaps most strongly evidenced by the scrapbooking industry itself, which gained steam in the early 1900s following a series of ventures like Twain’s, and generated profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of the century (Tucker et al., 2006: 21). Similar to today’s social media sites, where users can utilize built-in features to manage the flow of news articles, videos and other media of interest, commercial scrapbooks offered the user special pre-printed fields for posting specific kinds of printed and written information. Helfand (2008) describes a 1921 scrapbook called A Girl’s Graduation Days, one of countless scrapbook-related products marketed to young women, which included various student-specific section headings like ‘Class Prophecy’, ‘Interclass Debates,’ and ‘Candy Recipes’. Helfand notes, however, that scrapbook holders often resisted such pre-printed recommendations, retrofitting their own preferred content to the page and paying no mind to the apparent incongruity. In this particular scrapbook the owner opted to sign off unexpectedly with a poetic phrase, ‘End of the Rainbow’, in the middle of a page originally reserved for ‘Plays’ (Helfand, 2008: 21). The frequency with which users went against commercial recommendations within scrapbooks presents a problem for researchers, who often must rely on scant textual clues to make interpretations of what was included (and not included) in these personal media assemblages. The issue resonates today in social media research, where it is common to encounter users playfully opposing the dominant posting conventions of websites’ data fields (Marwick, 2005: 15-17).

In the early twentieth century, many users employed more specialized strategies in navigating their ‘new media’ environments than their nineteenth-century predecessors, collecting clippings more selectively and creating personal media assemblages that more coherently testified to their individual interests. Single-theme scrapbooks, often devoted to a single celebrity or cultural phenomenon, became a popular way of tracking something (or someone) over time and across multiple media channels. Like today’s ‘fans’ and ‘followers’ on Facebook and other social media sites, scrapbooks gave fans a space in which they could follow people in the media without having any sort of real-life connection to them (boyd and Ellison, 2007: 213). Like a tailored news feed that pipes in updates about the activities of admired others, the fan scrapbook became the media consumer’s hub for compiling articles, pictures and magazine gossip about their favorite figures in the media. Such practices of mediated ‘following’ also allowed, at times, for connections between fan and celebrity. Hastie (2007: 28–33) notes that in the silent film era, female stars welcomed scrapbooks made for them by fans who meticulously tracked their lives and careers in the media.

As mass media industries grew stronger and more sophisticated, the pages of scrapbooks reflected the societal shift towards heavier mediation. Historians and archivists note that early twentieth-century scrapbooks showed signs of people attempting to manage the massive flows of media in their lives, in ways that would, much later in the century, be expressed by the diverging cultural views of French theorists Michel de Certeau (1984) and Guy Debord (1983) (Garvey, 2004: 207-208; Tucker et al., 2006: 20). For Certeau, citizens of modern societies actively respond to the influx of texts in their lives through a process of ‘textual poaching’. Moving through their media-saturated societies not as passive consumers but as active users, individuals actively appropriate and refashion mass-produced texts for their own personal needs (Certeau, 1984). Debord (1983), in contrast, laments in Society of the Spectacle that modern subjects have become passively dependent on the streams of spectacles served up by commodity capitalism. The quality of society and social relationships declines as everyday life becomes increasingly mediated by manufactured images and representations (Tucker et al., 2006: 20). In this view, scrapbooks and social media would appear to be signs not of users’ creativity and agency but of their addiction to status displays and spectacle. Yet the multiplicity of possible meanings contained within a given personal media assemblage suggests that Certeau’s and Debord’s viewpoints can be taken as complementary. As Johnson (2006) observes in her study of a scrapbook created by avant-garde artist Hannah Höch in Weimar Germany, Höch’s juxtaposition of images of Hollywood glamour with barren or alienating tableaus of industrial modernity communicated her position as both an avid consumer and an active critic of American mass culture. Whether one views the public’s interactions with social media as a form of active, personalized poaching or of passive consumption, there is ample evidence of such activities in both scrapbooks and on Facebook (Vejby and Wittkower, 2010). In both sites, heavily involved or curated personal media assemblages can be just as easily interpreted as artful creations or as evidence of overreliance on or obsession with media. This contradiction continues to resound in social media discourse, where concerns about ‘online addiction’ are just as common as celebrations of the platforms’ democratic and expressive empowerment of the public.

Expressing taste and building cultural capital

A final function that Facebook and scrapbooks share is the enablement of expressions of taste, which can potentially translate into real-life gains in cultural capital. Cultural capital refers to one’s accumulated knowledge about society, and is obtained through education and credentials, inherited knowledge and the acquisition of high-status goods (Bourdieu, 1984). While expressing taste is a way of denoting one’s existing cultural capital, it can also serve as a bridge to amassing more capital and facilitating further social mobility. Several studies have shown that social media sites are arenas in which users engage in impression management, identity performance, and/or expression of taste, often with the implicit or explicit aims of boosting their social status (Barash et al., 2007; Liu, 2007; Papacharissi, 2009; Zhou et al., 2008). While ‘taste performances’ are in full view on Facebook and other SNS (Liu, 2007), they may be less obvious to readers of scrapbooks. Here it is necessary to underscore that scrapbooks, while widely understood as a private hobby, are rooted in social traditions of not only exchanging friendly inscriptions (as described above) but also in commodity collection and display. In the sixteenth century, European elites kept their albums of collected print matter − then a luxury enjoyed only by society’s upper crust − inside Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities (Tucker et al., 2006: 6). As treasured objects, these primitive scrap albums were displayed along with other collected specimens as a way of signaling the wealthy status and cultivated tastes of the owners. Over centuries, as scrapbooks became cheaper to create they evolved into what Tucker et al. (2006: 6) describe as ‘the equivalent of the poor family’s cabinet of curiosities’. They were assembled ‘not so much to serve the memory as to enact rituals of consumption and the hoarding of treasure’.

An example of taste performance that is common within scrapbooks and Facebook is the social exchange of tokens, such as sharing news articles among friends. In a study of how people share clippings from print and online media, Marshall and Bly (2004) observe that the value of circulating articles among friends and coworkers goes far beyond the items’ informational content. Rather, exchanging clippings is a way to establish mutual awareness among contacts, express common interests and tastes, and build rapport. This social dimension of media exchange is particularly evident on Facebook, where the sharing of digital articles on the ‘wall’ is a heavily performative act, visible to the entire mutual network of the two contacts. In contrast, in scrapbooks and other print-era personal media archives, saved clippings from friends usually indicate more bounded interpersonal exchanges that may or may not have been intended for public view. Still, the scrapbook’s relative privacy compared to Facebook need not disqualify it as a space of social performance. Historical studies suggest that scrapbooks, and related personal media forms, were created not simply for safekeeping or posterity, but also for the more immediate task of being shown socially and/or helping the owner achieve distinction (Bourdieu, 1984).

One such object is the confession album. Reaching peak popularity in Victorian Britain, these books contained blank questionnaires on a number of topics designed to elicit information about the inscriber’s attitudes, opinions and aspirations. Confession albums were typically filled out by friends during social visits or at school, and by the twentieth century their format was replicated in various autograph albums and student scrapbooks. Confession albums are paradoxical because, as Matthews (2000: 128) notes, they are ‘an intimate form that invites self-revelation with no guarantee of discretion’. They anticipate in many ways the conventions of semi-public ‘sharing’ on Facebook in that they capture and display people’s personal thoughts, but with the assumption that they will be circulated among friends (Papacharissi, 2009). In terms of format, they are strikingly similar to the ‘Friend Questions’ app and the ‘25 Random Things About Me’ meme that spread virally on Facebook in early 2009, in which users created a ‘note’ providing personalized answers to a widely copied list of questions. Some questions and responses in an 1880 confession album include:

What characteristic do you most admire in a man?

Courteousness to all.

What characteristic do you most admire in a woman?

Unselfishness.

What is your favourite pastime?

Gardening.

What gives you greatest annoyance?

Bad Principle.

What foreign land would you most like to visit?

Palestine or Switzerland. (Matthews, 2000: 142)

Matthews (2000) notes that confession books were a printed outgrowth of a nineteenth-century parlor game in which groups of eligible young men and women asked and answered playful questions as a way of subtly screening each other as suitable romantic partners. Players could respond only through selected quotations of poetic verse, but in this context of pretend courtship the answers acquired ‘exaggerated significance’. This seemingly ‘innocent recreation’ of hinting at one’s desires through textual quotation was in fact a mask for the more serious business of finding a partner and securing a position within a comfortable social class (Matthews, 2000: 129–130). Later confession books, which reappeared in updated forms in commercial scrapbooks, did not necessarily carry those hefty associations of courtship, but they did continue to provide semi-public forums for friends to express and assess each other’s attitudes and tastes.

Scrapbook users also expressed taste through a mechanism that has been identified on social media sites as ‘interest tokens’ (Liu, 2007). Today, interest tokens are references to books, music, movies, TV and other socially recognizable phenomena, which double as ‘a cultural vocabulary for the language of taste’ (Liu, 2007: 257). Whereas on Facebook a person might express a taste for Casablanca by listing it in her favorite movies, posting a link to a video clip on her profile, or ‘liking’ a similar link posted by a friend, a scrapbook user in 1943 could express a similar sentiment by pasting a Casablanca ticket stub or advertisement in the pages of her scrapbook. Such tokens, when analyzed as part of a broader personal media assemblage on a Facebook profile or scrapbook page, can potentially speak volumes about a user’s cultural aspirations, dispositions and desires for social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 28–36).

The expression of taste in scrapbooks is particularly notable in the early twentieth century, when society was newly awash with illustrated catalogues and magazines promoting the consumption of high-status goods. In this period, the craft of clipping took on new connotations of class-climbing, self-improvement and cultural uplift. Scrapbooks helped people visualize ‘the good life’, lending expression to their media-driven fantasies of fine homes, international travel, improved physical appearance and desires for specific consumer products. Like a customizable handbook for negotiating one’s place in an increasingly fast-paced consumer society, ‘scrapbooks fit seamlessly into the rituals of consumption and etiquette that helped new members of the middle class identify one another’ (Tucker et al., 2006: 10). Viewed this way, scrapbooks served not only as a storage place for private desires, but also as a practicing ground for the kinds of real-life taste performances that today are just as common on- as offline (Liu, 2007; Papacharissi, 2009).

While both scrapbooks and Facebook can be seen as tools for consolidating cultural capital through the social expression and assessment of taste, they also underscore problematic continuities in social media access and use. The tendency of social media to help users reaffirm their social networks, manage mediated information, and express taste raises further questions about their accessibility to different cultural groups and their capacities to reproduce social privilege. While it is worth celebrating that both scrapbooks and Facebook are strongly associated with women and youth − two groups historically underrepresented in ‘official’ archives − there is also a longstanding and troubling association between these kinds of social-archival media practices and predominantly white, middle-class media users. The aristocratic and literary origins of scrapbooking point to enduring inequalities in the distribution of personal media tools and skills in the past, paralleling what many see as a ‘digital divide’ today that stratifies levels of online social media use by socioeconomic status (Jansen, 2010). In addition to recognizing this history of unequal access, there is also a need for scholars to further interrogate the kinds of representations that these media promote along the lines of gender, race and class (Nakamura, 2008). In this way, too, thinking historically about social media may be instructive. As Smith (1999) has suggested in American Archives, the popularization of photography in the late nineteenth century prompted new social practices of surveillance, scrutinizing and ‘reading’ the bodies and faces of others − from middle-class family portraits, to mug shots, to images of racial difference used in the ‘science’ of eugenics. While this booming visual culture ushered in vibrant new forms of self-representation through images, it also reinforced the perceived barriers between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ selves. In today’s social media climate, the pressure to post images and information about oneself on sites like Facebook, to willingly cast one’s identity into pre-ordained data fields, and to maintain a positive ‘digital dossier’ online, opens up similar questions of how identities are under threat of being disciplined, ‘othered’, or excluded within the social spaces and economies of the Internet. In other words, while it is easy to celebrate the egalitarian and creative facets of media like scrapbooks and Facebook, their attendant histories of privilege, surveillance and exclusion also need to be taken into account when considering their broader meanings and implications as social and archival texts.

Conclusion: Archiving the self through scrapbooks and social media

Like scrapbookers in the print era, today’s active users of Facebook and other SNS leave mediated traces of the events and social encounters that shape their lives. While it is difficult to trace a direct causal connection between print-era scrapbooks and contemporary social media, this study has drawn parallels between a few of the multiple media traditions that gave rise to each form and shaped their cultural uptake. These traditions include, but are not limited to, youth-driven practices of textual exchange in school, literary and consumer practices of ‘curating’ and saving media for reference or reuse, and the mobilization of media tokens to express personal interests and tastes. I have also suggested that the formal and functional similarities between scrapbooks and Facebook − as sites of personal media assemblage and archives, documents of friendship, guides in navigating new media abundance, and platforms for taste performances − make them evidential of an enduring overlap between social and auto-archival processes in modern media culture, where the impulse to perform through media in public and social ways is often coupled with a private or personal desire to preserve that media for the future.

Recognizing these continuities between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of self-presentation and self-documentation becomes increasingly important in the digital era, particularly as scholars and media analysts grapple with social media’s present and future role as a personal and cultural archive. There is a growing concern that online activities are supplanting older autobiographical traditions such as keeping diaries, photo albums, shoeboxes stuffed with letters and scrapbooks. While this may be the case, such concerns are often based on assumptions that users approach old and new forms of personal media with fundamentally different objectives, and that the personal record produced by the former is somehow more legitimate than the latter. A recent New York Times article entitled ‘Cyberspace When You’re Dead’ exemplifies this idea, suggesting that the reason why fewer people are choosing paper-based media for ‘leaving a record of life … for heirs or the future’ is because they are too ‘busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff’ (Walker, 2011). But do users really approach social media with no thought to the future, unlike the supposedly forward-thinking, diligent documenters of yesteryear?

As I have tried to show above, history’s scrapbookers were perhaps not always as archive-minded as we see them today. Rather, the old personal media assemblages of the print age played a number of immediate, social roles for their owners, much as today’s ‘life-affirming digital stuff’ does for users of social media. In addition to serving as a storage place for memories, the scrapbook often functioned as an everyday object of social sharing, co-inscription, performance and display. While scrapbooking continues to be a popular hobby and a global industry in the twenty-first century, many of the old social uses for scrapbooks have carried over into the digital domain. The tradition of pasting together a media-based biography is gradually being replicated, and some would say replaced, by new habits of posting, sharing and performing online. The question we face now, as researchers and users of various forms of social media, is how to approach them as sites that work simultaneously as social arenas, blank pages for our personal media assemblages, and archives of our recorded life experiences.

The rapid acceleration of social media use in the last decade has led to additional concerns about data access and ownership. As digital communications become more instantaneous and ubiquitous in everyday life, there is growing concern about how that social data is being stored by media corporations and, in many cases, made available to advertisers or other third parties. Now that many social media users have participated in these online spaces for several years, some are turning to them not just for social sharing, but also for revisiting records of their previous activities (Ames and Naaman, 2007; Garde-Hansen, 2009). This suggests that more research is needed to identify social media users’ self-archiving habits, desires, abilities and awareness online. Following Acquisti and Gross’s (2006) study of online privacy, in which there was found to be a discrepancy between people’s beliefs about privacy versus their actual online behaviors, we might ask whether a similar lack of public awareness exists about social media sites’ terms of agreement and how they might affect the future accessibility of the personal digital archive (Cox, 2009).

Despite its seemingly limitless storage capacity, Facebook currently poses significant challenges to users in terms of access to and ownership of their accumulated data. At the time of writing, the website is not designed for the easy retrieval of items posted in the distant past (McCown and Nelson, 2009). While Facebook users can dig through their profiles to access earlier photo albums, messages or wall posts, the site does not promote archival accessibility through tools like detailed indexes, advanced search or calendars, nor does it guarantee that posted items will always be accessible. Facebook’s recent addition of the ‘timeline’ to individual profiles, however, presents an opportunity to examine how users’ archival behaviors might change with the new design. While Facebook currently allows users to download copies of their profiles and photos for their own safekeeping, concerns remain about how the company uses the personal data it collects, and what may happen to its archive if the site changes its terms of use or disappears altogether. Furthermore, the proprietary nature of Facebook’s data makes it challenging for scholars to use it for research. The website is at once one of the richest social archives in recent history and one of the most tightly controlled. It is, as McCown and Nelson (2009: 1) put it, a ‘“walled garden” where user activities are trapped’.

Comparing studies of social media to scrapbook research reveals that personal media assemblages and archives are ubiquitous and enduring cultural formations in modern mediated societies. Whether ‘old’ or ‘new’, analog or digital, individually owned or institutionalized, these abundant artifacts present researchers with persistent challenges in making sense of users’ fragmentary self-representations. As a final illustration, one question that has guided much social media research is whether users prefer to present a sunny, idealized version of themselves online or a more accurate picture of reality (Back et al., 2010). This is not a uniquely new methodological concern, as scholars have also grappled with it when studying scrapbooks. As far back as 1920, one critic in the New Orleans Times-Picayune belittled scrapbooks as ‘“Pollyanna” books’, which ‘only mark the hours that shine, and contain not a hint of gloom between their optimistic covers’ (quoted in Helfand, 2008: 8). Helfand (2008: 9, 17) notes that the flexible, personal nature of scrapbooks has historically allowed users to ‘bury the truth or doctor the evidence’ regarding their self-representations, and present a kind of ‘selective obliviousness’ about political events and social concerns that may have been salient in the world around them. Thus, like the digital traces left on Facebook, the assemblages found in scrapbooks are significant as much for their inclusions as their omissions. Such media contain a wealth of cultural and historical material, but their variability of content, structuring mechanisms, and deeply personal dimensions present unique challenges to those who study them. With careful attention to the multiple functions, ranging from public to private, that scrapbooks and Facebook have performed for their users, as well as the varying levels of archival access and control afforded by the different technologies, scholars might continue to find new ways of ‘reading’ these assembled archival texts that yield useful insights into the social behaviors of the past and present.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal, Jennifer Light, and the participants in the ICA 2012 panel, ‘When New Technologies Were Old’, for their helpful comments on this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Katie Day Good is a PhD candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University. Her research interests include the history of mundane media, global communication and social forms of media exchange. Her dissertation will examine the rise of amateur internationalist media programs in American schools between World War I and World War II.

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