Session 6 - Online Furdentity and InFurraction

Online Identity:

Creating an online identity involves direct contribution to online spaces, be it through social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger, or even a personal website. Active online identities are created through sustained, involved interaction with other users via the medium of the internet. Through the internet, people are now able to participate and nurture--in a more open environment--communities that would otherwise be kept a secret. 

Wellman et. al.’s sense of networked individualism is actually a good hypothesis on how social interaction has changed due to increased internet connectivity. For this post I decided to investigate a site related to a subculture that (http://www.pa-furry.org//) involves a user community largely convinced they are human-shaped animals trapped in human bodies, commonly known as “Furries”. Thanks to the internet, I believe people like these furries are able to use the internet to "supplement" their communities. They can organize conventions, meetings at coffee shops, and find ways to promote their strange culture on websites like pa-furry.org and LiveJournal. 

Furries:
Ruining your next trip to Disneyland.

The furry world is a dark dark place where most people wouldn't dare tread, at least not without a can of pepper spray or some other form of protection. These people are normally ostracized for their deviant ways, therefore, much like the "goths" in the study in the Hodkinson article, the furries on http://www.pa-furry.org/ create individual spaces that link up and reinforce their subculture. Because of the (entirely appropriate) social stigma surrounding furries, their identities were usually kept as a secret in their offline lives. However, also like the goths studied by Hodkinson, OCs have given furries a way to do offline meetups in environments they feel comfortable in, like whitewater rafting.

Yes. People dressed up in animal suits kayaking is actually happening.

Just like any other social network, the furries crafted their online profile to present a certain "persona"; kind of along the lines of what was mentioned in the Liu article. They create their profiles to both be as unique as possible, some giving their "animal character" elaborate back-stories and behavioral qualities they might not possess/wish to posses in real life.

Three Scenarios:

Furnario 1 (Sun) -

Teddy Everyman has always enjoyed dragons. Lately, he's been feeling like he IS a dragon... trapped in the body of a man. He desires a social group that understands his feelings to provide him with moral support. So, he decides to start a profile on a popular furry website in his area in order to connect with like-minded people. 

• Teddy goes to furry website and finds the account creation page
• The account creation process is simple and quick, so he is able to devote time to developing his profile
• After his profile is created, he uses the search box on a sidebar in the site to find "dragons" to see if there are users that can give him any advice
• He successfully finds the profile of one "Rygon the red dragon" and initiates a friend request

Yes it's real. No, you can't unsee it.

• Rygon accepts his friend request and they start a dialogue 

• Teddy is able to find support from another "dragon" and becomes an active member on the website, helping other dragon "hatchlings" with their freaky problems

Furnario 2 (Sun) -  

Annie Allweek wants to organize a photo shoot with all her friends dressed up in their animal suits. She decides to use the polling feature of the furry enthusiast site she is a member of. 

• Annie creates a poll

• She asks the administrator of the website for front-page space to promote her event
• Her request is granted and the poll runs for two weeks
• Through the poll, she learns that 20 out of 35 members are willing to participate in a "fursuit photo shoot"
• Annie successfully conducts her photo shoot after arranging a time and place with the willing participants

Furnario 3 (Rain) -

A. Bonny and I. Vory were living together in perfect harmony. They decided to sell their piano keyboard because they needed money for a new donkey suit concept they were designing. After seeking advice from members of their online furry community, they were directed to Craigslist as the best place to sell something.

• A. Bonny and I. Vory create an account with Craigslist 
• They create an ad describing the sale of their precious piano keyboard
• They post their address and include a picture of the front of their house so interested parties can come and inspect the piano
• A day later they get a phone call from an "interested party" that wants to know when A. and I. will be home so they can come see the piano
• A. and I. let the buyer know that they aren't home during the morning, but are usually available after 5pm everyday
• The potential buyer thanks them and says he will come in three days
• The next day in the afternoon, A. Bonny and I. Vory come home to see that their house was robbed
• The police arrive, hear their story, and suspect that the potential buyer was just casing the joint
• A. Bonny and I. Vory are depressed and seek solace from the furry website
• The only reply they get is a link to this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• (; _ ;)

How people in animal costumes express their online identity...

...with animal drawings for their avatars. Yes, I'm serious. The members of Pennsylvania Furries either draw their own, or have more artistically talented members draw their avatars. Avatars are typically created to represent the type of animal members most identify with. This ties in directly to a point made in the Ploderer article, "like on a stage in a theatre, people appropriate the social network site to promote accomplishments."

Members of the Pennsylvania furry site take great pride in sewing their suits and showing off their artwork. Although I personally find their handiworks too far outside the norm for for me to ever be interested in their world, I can certainly appreciate the craft they display in sewing life-sized animal suits. 

Some kids were a little TOO impressed with the animatronics at Chuck E Cheese...

Identities are maintained through sustained interaction with the community. There are meet-ups, group fundraisers, online events, forum posts, photo caption contests, and other things one would typically find on less niche social networks. The site also uses social tagging (http://www.pa-furry.org/tags) to help users navigate topics of interest to them, with more popular topics having a larger font than the others. 

Cementing an identity in the furry community also involves learning special vocabulary and using special clothing. The article by Doneth said it best: 

...information fashions can create virtual walls, allowing those in the know to recognize others within their subculture via their common understanding of jokes and references that have not yet spread to the mainstream. (Doneth, 2007)

Furries, like any other community (but a lot hairier), have the in-jokes and references that Doneth writes about. For a community to feel unique, to feel special, these kinds of things are important. 

In summary:

I looked at the furry community because I saw in it a slight parallel with games like World of Warcraft, where a user selects an avatar to represent themselves in the virtual space with. I noticed that people can in fact develop an emotional connection to a character that they see themselves as--be it an Elf in a game or a bear suit--but this is something I'll discuss in another post. I'm no closer to understanding the world of furries than I was before examining their website, but I now have a clearer picture of how interactions on social networks function, and how there are certain norms that establishing an online identity will tend to follow. 

Furrocious sources:

Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill and Lynn Cherny (1998). The Dynamics of Mass Interaction. Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW98), Seattle, Washington, 257-264.

Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz and Kakuko Miyata (2003).  The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html

Donath, Judith. (2007). Signals in Social Supernets. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1).  http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donath.html

Liu, H. (2007). Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/liu.html

Ploderer, B., S. Howard & P. Thomas (2008). Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties Over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites. Proceedings of CSCW 2008.
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/student/rhd/berndp/research/CSCW2008Ploderer.pdf

Hodkinson, Paul (2006).  Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement Among UK Goths.  In: A. Bruns and J. Jacobs, Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang, 187-199.
http://www.paulhodkinson.co.uk/publications/hodkinsonsubculturalblogging.pdf

Huberman, Bernardo, Daniel Romero and Fang Wu (2009).  Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope" First Monday 14(1).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/2063