This post comes from the Global Social Media Impact Study Blog, originally published here.

At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but over the first several months in my fieldsite in northern Chile I began to realize that one of the reasons I never quite felt totally at home was that the aesthetics of the place never quite fit with my own sense of aesthetics. By aesthetics, I mean the effort and thought that people put into the way things look. In my fieldsite, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, I noticed this in public parks and municipal buildings, in both the inside and outside of homes, and in the way people dressed. It was not only an intellectual exercise, but a visceral feeling. If I wore the clothes that I was used to wearing, perhaps a dress or a fitted button down shirt, I felt as if everyone was staring at me because I was dressed with too much care. Perhaps they were right. There wasn’t really anywhere to go looking smart. The only bar in the city had cement floors, cinderblock walls, and heavy metal bands playing live every weekend.

Over time I thought more about the sense of aesthetics in Alto Hospicio, and realized that while I had considered it entirely utilitarian at first, there was something more particular about it. The aesthetic was very much a part of the accessibility and normativity that prevailed in the city. The predominant aesthetic was not nonexistent, nor did it always privilege form above function or the “choice of the necessary” as Bourdieu calls the working class aesthetic. While many people clearly could afford to redecorate their homes or buy expensive clothing from the department stores in the nearby port city, their aesthetic choices leaned toward an appearance that was not too assuming. They didn’t flaunt or show off in any way. It was an aesthetic that was presented as if it were not one, because aspiring to a particular aesthetic would be performing something; a certain kind of pretension. Yet the aesthetic relies on deliberate choices to not be pretentious or striking; to be modest; to be unassuming. This aesthetic then not only predominated in the material world, but also online. Unlike in Brazil, where young people would never post a selfie in front of an unfinished wall, this was precisely the type of place youth in northern Chile might pose. While in Brazil this would associate the person with backwardness that contradicts the type of upward mobility they hope to present, in northern Chile this type of backdrop would add a sense of authenticity to the person and their unassuming lifestyle.

So, in the end, what began as a visceral feeling of discomfort in the field site, actually led to a very important insight. As I told academic friends many times during my fieldwork, “This place is a great site for research, but not at all a great site for living.” Fortunately, even some of the “not at all great” parts of about living in northern Chile helped my research more than I realized at first.

For More on Aesthetics in Alto Hospicio
Absent Aesthetics in Alto Hospicio
Aesthetics and Digital Media in Alto Hospicio

Reference

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Richard Nice, trans. New York: Routledge (1984), pp 41, 372, 376.

I recently gave a talk in the department of anthropology at my home university Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile about normativity and aesthetics as they appear on social media in Alto Hospicio. The talk was in Spanish, but I of course organized my thoughts in English first, particularly since it was based in party by a chapter of my forthcoming book, Social Media in Northern Chile (with University College London Press). After the presentation I created some pdfs of the talk, complete with all the images that accompany it, which can now be found in English here and in español aquí.

Hace un mes, di una charla en la facultad de antropología en mi universidad Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile en el tema de normatividad y la estetica en las redes sociales de Alto Hospicio. Hice la charla en español, pero por supuesto organicé mis ideas primero en inglés porque la charla era basada en un capítulo de mi libro, se llama Social Media in Northern Chile, que aparecerá en 2016 con University College London Press. Después de la charla, creé pdfs de la información que presenté, con los imagines, ahora en este sitio, en español aquí y en English here. 

The first time I was invited out by friends on a Friday night in my fieldsite in Northern Chile, I was surprised by the ways social media and technology permeated the evening’s events. My new friend Alex* sent me a message on Facebook asking if I would like to go out with he and his friends Andrea and Edith, who I had never met. When he got to my street to pick me up, he sent another Facebook message to let me know. As I walked down the stairs and to the parking lot of my apartment building, I knew I was looking for a Honda because he was constantly posting pictures of it on Facebook. He was standing leaning against the car looking at his Samsung phone. When I got to the car, he began to tell me a story of locking his keys in the car while at Edith’s house. I already knew most of the story though, because someone had made fun of him for locking the keys inside via his Facebook wall about an hour earlier.

read the rest of this entry on the WHY WE POST blog

There is a certain excitement in gaining a new facebook friend. Sometimes you come across someone from the past and suddenly they are catapulted into the present. They’re married. They have 3 kids? Their hair is an entirely different shade than it was 10 years ago. They post conservative political memes. What a shame…they used to be so open-minded. 

But it is a different sort of excitement when an acquaintance becomes a facebook friend. Yesterday, my neighbor Sarita, who I have known for a month, requested my friendship. I know a few things about her already: She is divorced. She has 4 children. I know where she lives. I know her job. A few nights ago, when she came over to collect my portion of the electricity and gas bills, we ended up talking about Chilean politics. But that is pretty much an exhaustive list. 

But it is an entirely different sort of excitement when an acquaintance becomes a facebook friend. Yesterday, my neighbor Sarita, who I have known in passing for a month, requested my friendship. I know a few things about her already: She is divorced. She has 4 children. I obviously know where she lives. I know what she does for a living. A few nights ago, when she came over to collect my portion of the electricity and gas bills, we ended up talking about Chilean politics. But that is pretty much an exhaustive list.

But now, facebook gives me a much wider view of her personality. I have discovered her birthday was just a few days after we met, and suddenly feel slight guilt that I didn’t wish her a happy day. I have a sense of her taste in music because she has posted several youtube videos of songs to her account. I see a bar where she was tagged in Iquique. I see that she wished Dios blesses her friends often. There is a photo of her hiking in the desert from last year. These things are certainly not reaching into the deepest recesses of her personality. But they are providing insight to aspects I might not have learned quickly otherwise.

I suppose she may share a wider variety with “close friends,” but perhaps what is more interesting is what does not appear. There are no pictures of her children. There is no reference to her job. Not even a reference to Alto Hospicio (her location says Iquiuqe). There are no political memes or commentary. No mention of the fact that she is taking night classes for a liceo in Social Work at the university in Iquique. And it leaves one to wonder…what else doesn’t appear here?

The new-new facebook friend also creates a certain anxiety about what she now knows about me. Though Sarita only sees some of what I post, she may now have a glimpse into my family, my politics (which can be a little radical at times), and my propensity to have fotos taken of myself in bars with punk rock tattooed friends. Will my proclaimed atheism worry her? Will the pictures of Marcelo blowing condoms like balloons at my despedida from La Paz shock her?

And with this, questions of editing again emerge. I second guess if I should keep certain pictures tagged. What image do I want to present to Sarita, to others in Alto Hospicio, to the academic world, to friends of friends? And in a way, I’m lucky to have not only facebook privacy settings at my disposal, but language barriers that I can use to my advantage. Political rants go in English (though I’m sure they upset many friends from my small town high school). When posting in Spanish I can be a bit more understated. And of course I have friends in the US who are capable of using google translate, and South American friends who speak excellent English. But nonetheless, it’s interesting to think about the ways we tailor, edit, and curate. And the ways we worry about it. No doubt what we present, especially for those that move from acquaintance to friend via facebook, has real social impact.

Today, I retroactively added some blog writing from my first trip to La Paz in 2009 to these fieldnotes. Previously, I had published this stuff on the new practically defunct blog I began when I went to Lima in 2005. I think they're more at home here (if blog posts can be anthropomorphized enough to feel at home anywhere). 

So now, you can read about:
the first time I arrived in La Paz
my first Día de La Paz
the first photographs I took in La Paz
my first lucha libre event in La Paz
and the first time I truly loved La Paz

One thing I’ve noticed about “coming back” for the second time after fieldwork is “complete” is that the overall terrain of my friendships has shifted. My fieldwork friendships were perhaps out of the ordinary to begin with. Though I liked, respected, and enjoyed the company of the people with whom I was doing research, they were not my real friends in La Paz. They were not the people with whom I usually ate dinner, went to the movies, watched tv, danced or drank with on Saturday nights. I saw them often during training and attending lucha libre events. We would eat together after training or stop by the internet café for a few hours. I went to their birthday parties. But I did not call them when I was bored. I did not ask them to accompany me to the airport at strange hours. I did not stop by their workplaces just to say hello when I was bored.

Those were different friends. And there were a lot of them. I think, to an extent during my fieldwork, I felt that accumulating friends strengthened my authenticity—as a non-gringa, as a kollita, as someone who was part of this social scene in La Paz. And I met some very interesting, smart, and dynamic people. And I wanted all of them to be my close personal friends.

I had a rich social life. As I wrote in my less-academicy blog (though that’s a shaky line to draw), In La Paz, I wear vintage, rockabilly dresses or ripped jeans and t shirts given to me by tattoo artist friends. I’m a live music junkie, a tattoo shop groupie, booze-slinging benefactor, restaurant aficionada, mural-painting sidekick, dj enthusiast, and a legitimate luchadora who rarely pays for a drink.

But now, I have different priorities I guess. The people I used to be excited to see can be dreary at times. I lack enthusiasm for all the dining and boozing. I really would just rather hang out with the few close friends that I really care about than taxi around the city hopping from social scene to social scene.

I don’t know if this is what happens as you get older. Maybe it’s being a doctor (ha!). Maybe this is my form of “settling down.” But I just don’t have the energy that I once did. I don’t want to dance all night. I don’t want more than 3 glasses of wine. I want to be able to hear the conversation I’m participating in. I don’t want to impress anyone. I don’t want to prove myself. But maybe what this all means is that I’m more comfortable here now. Friends are no longer a superficial method of accounting my investment or my embeddedness. They are the people who make me smile and laugh and stop worrying about my (possibly non-existent academic) “future”. They are just my friends.

I was at a La Paz bar around Purim this year, and there happened to be a lot of Israelis there (because there are always a lot of Israelis in La Paz). One young man, whose English was not particularly good, was hitting on me. He told me that he was a dj and occasionally (about every 4th sentence) mentioned “I’m famous in Tel Aviv.” Eventually growing weary of this statement I told him “Well, I’m famous in La Paz.”

This is not exactly true. But I find more and more that my “fame” in La Paz resembles the way I felt in the small town where I grew up. I’ve written already how I consistently run into people in the street here. But I think my day yesterday in general was a nice, comforting, and sometimes surprising indication of what I might egotistically (and not without irony) refer to as fame.

I woke up and was writing a bit at home. Sharing chocolatey cereal with my roommate Thomas, when our other roommate Jack came into the room. “Anybody want to go repelling today?”

Ummm…..maybe?

After hearing a meager amount of details, I agreed. “But I have to go pick up my package at the post office first.” So I set off, fully expecting this to be step 1 of 7 or 8 in customs forms and bank deposits before my old jeans and sneakers would fall into my hands. There was no line to pick up international packages, and the pollera clad woman behind the window found my box quickly. She held onto my passport while I went downstairs to customs. And there in the doorway was the man who was actually quite helpful when Alé and I were attempting to get the box of tattoo needles through customs. The man walked over, took one look at me and said, “You look familiar. Have you been here before?” I explained yes, and why, and he asked “There aren’t needles in this one are there?” “No, just some old shoes of mine from the US.” He handed the box back without opening it. 

So I ran back upstairs, reclaimed my passport, and headed to Hotel Presidente, La Paz’s 5 star establishment. In the lobby I ran into Brian, a Death Road biking guide I’ve met a few times before. This Urban Rush business is his, and he wanted to do a soft opening to practice to asked Jack to invite some people to try it out for free. He led me to the elevator, and we went up to the 15th floor, then up some grand stairs to a restaurant that looks out over La Paz. And then finally up a small spiral staircase to a smallish room on the very top of the building. There was an open window with some scaffolding around it for harnesses. Yep. That’s where I was about to step out of.

Eventually, Jack came around with some people from the bar he manages and we were all given awesome orange jumpsuits to wear and went through a little training. I, for some reason, volunteered to go first on the practice wall, and thus was first in line for going down the real thing. And so I did. 17 stories. With about 5 stories of free fall. And then they convinced me to do it face first. And that was even more awesome. So yes, I was the very first person, not employed by the company to try this all out. 

After my thrilling experience, I had another. Dropping off laundry. Umberto, my laundry man, always strikes up a conversation. This laundry place is nowhere remotely convenient to my new apartment, but Umberto always gives me a discount along with good stories, so I return. This time he decided not to charge me at all. “Why pay? You can pay next time.”

After that I headed over to a café to do some writing, and along the way ran into Jack and Samuel, one of the bar’s owners. Less than a block later I saw Gonz from Tito’s and explained that I had just been repelling to him. “Que Bueno!” He walked off with a “Nos vemos esta fin de semanana” and a kiss to the cheek. 

The rest of the day was less exciting. A bit of writing, eating dinner, hanging around the house. But its nice to live somewhere that doesn’t feel strange any more.