❧ Self-Labeling on the Web ❧
I asked a question of my followers on Neocities recently:
If everyone removed their social location labels from their site (nationality, race, age, gender, disability, etc.) would you browse Neocities differently? Would your own website be different? Just trying to think through the usefulness and limits of labels.
The answers that I got included a range of attitudes that reflected my own ambivalence about labels. For practical reasons, the only social location label on websites that I consistently value is whether or not the site belongs to a minor. Beyond that, I haven't come down on the side of being for or against including, not just social location labels, but all kinds of quick personal identifiers on one's website.
I think certain groups of people are more likely to self-label in public, probably because they are in the minority in most spaces and are used to thinking about how others will perceive them based on their identity. People in any minority feel differences from the norm more acutely. Hence, for instance, people of color who get frustrated with white people saying "I don't see race," because people of color know that the world DOES label them, even if well-meaning white people believe they don't. I have definitely seen Black people online remark that if someone doesn't identify their race in an online space you can assume they're white--that not feeling the need to identify yourself is a sign of white privilege or a white worldview. (I am writing this from the perspective of a white person, btw.)*
I came of age online when self-labeling became the norm, during the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web 1.0 was a place of anonymity. The most you would be asked to do was give your A/S/L (age/sex/location) when you entered a chat room. In early Web 2.0, as blogs became prevalent, many people were still writing under pseudonyms but presented cohesive, real-world identities behind them, which necessitated the use of social location labels. (It should be noted that most of the blogs that I was reading at the time were about social justice, and these writers--who received threats and harassment regularly--had to balance anonymity with authority to speak on behalf of the communities they were advocating for.) Including your social locators on your blog or social media profile was a means of helping to navigate online spaces full of diverse people. It became a habit to me after a while, and something I came to expect of myself and others.
With the rising prevalence of social media and dating sites, self-labeling really took off. People habitually labeled themselves not just with basic social locators like race, gender, and nationality, but with political stances, personality assessments, and media subcultures. I started to question this when around 2015 I joined a small message board community for tarot enthusiasts, most of whom were queer or leftist. I read one person's profile in which she listed nothing about herself except the privileges which she held: white, a citizen of the country in which she resided, cisgender, TAB (temporarily able-bodied), etc. It was as if she was trying to preemptively defend herself against people who might criticize her for being a person with unearned privilege by flattening her identity into a series of labels. In other words, the labels became something to hide behind rather than something that revealed herself to others.
Coming to Neocities in early 2024, I found it interesting that, in a place that fosters an otherwise Web 1.0 experience, people often similarly use their websites to display their labels rather than themselves. I mean, sure, the old-school personality quizzes are fun. But I have seen sites that contain a lot of self-labeling through the use of blinkies and buttons or lists of political beliefs or favorite bands or books--and not much else besides. Because I don't consume a lot of popular media, lists of people's favorite movies, TV shows, video games, etc. usually mean nothing to me. Telling me that Che Guevara is one of your heroes or that you are an ENTJ or even that you are a white American doesn't tell me much about you.
For some people, a site that's mostly a list of their labels and interests may be an exercise in speaking about themselves to themselves; as a container in which they are forced, by its constraints and its publicness, to articulate their own identity as they understand it. That, as a visitor, I would find such websites boring does not mean that they are without their value, but I am also entitled to become bored with them and click away.
As for me: the older I get, self-labeling is becoming less important to my inner experience, while I still see its necessity for political reasons. For instance: I cannot un-white myself because the world will always treat me as white, whether I want it to or not. So it's better to just use the label with a big grain of salt and a deep understanding of history. Or, for instance, neither my gender assigned at birth nor the many Tumblr gender identities I've tried on seem to match my felt sense of my gender. Therefore I don't have any blinkies or flags on my page proudly identifying myself. I've also stopped being jealous of people who can display their blinkies with ease: what I am after in this life is far bigger than something that can be reduced to a label. But politically, I align myself with both queer/non-binary people and cis women because in different contexts I am treated as belonging to those categories, often privileged, sometimes not.
When I am feeling intellectually lazy, the first thing I will do when I land on someone's website is go to their About page and see what labels they apply to themselves. The labels I find may keep me interested, but more often than not, they are an excuse to believe I have explored the site fully and to click away. Sometimes, if there are no labels on someone's website, I will feel disappointed or even frustrated: they did not give me the easy way out. If I want to understand the person behind this website, I am going to have to actually explore it. I am very aware that this is the experience that I have created for my own readers, being the hypocrite that I am.
The last consideration with self-labeling is safety and privacy. Someone who has read my entire site will know a lot about me, even some scandalous and embarrassing things. But in order to find those things, they have to engage with the entirety of what I have expressed here. They can harass or criticize me if they want, but they do have to engage with my full humanity in order to do so. If they want to label me, I can't stop them, but I will make them work for it by declining to label myself.
Getting to know a person is hard; fully knowing another human being is impossible. A website is a magical little place where we can still try to do it, though. Sometimes labels help us do that, sometimes they do the opposite. As for me: who am I to say?
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* Furthermore, that white people think it's a good thing to ignore others' differences from themselves shows how we have been taught to reflexively devalue difference. Web 1.0 was a much more anonymous space, I think in part, because of who set its cultural norms: often white American men. White Americans are unique among cultural groups on the globe because we are raised to believe that we have neither a culture nor an ethnicity when we, in fact, very much do. The historical reasons for this are beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice to say that it tracks that a space where white American men established the norms would not make a priority of people speaking about or across cultural differences.