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

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.