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Katie Day Good

Northwestern University, USA

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

Corresponding author:
Katie Day Good, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive,
Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Email: kdgood@u.northwestern.edu

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558 new media & society 15(4)

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 cul-
tural 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 trou-
ble 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, fragmen-
tary and highly individualized. Scrapbooks have not achieved the ‘official’ or authorita-
tive 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, pre-
senting 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 under-
stood as private hobbyist creations, and Facebook as a site of public and social interac-
tion, 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 continui-
ties in the public and private practices they have promoted for users, and the methodo-
logical 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

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Good 559

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 contem-
porary 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 histori-
cization 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 inter-
acted with media texts to both express themselves socially and, simultaneously, to docu-
ment their lives.

Formal comparisons
While scrapbooks and Facebook are different in multiple and fundamental ways, begin-
ning 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 depend-
ence 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, mes-
sages, photographs, symbolic tokens, and snippets of meaningful items. In historical
scrapbooks, personal media assemblages typically include newspaper clippings, maga-
zine 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 assem-
blages. 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 scrap-
books 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

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560 new media & society 15(4)

histories of use. Variations of scrapbooks have been around for several centuries, evolv-
ing 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 construc-
tion and performance, and computer-mediated communication. As for the resultant ris-
ing 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 implica-
tions 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 recon-
figure their submission(s) in unexpected and unintended ways.
The metaphor of Facebook as an exhibition hall calls attention not only to the simul-
taneously social and archival capacities of the medium, but also the structural and corpo-
rate mechanisms that shape how the archive is assembled, maintained and made
accessible to different users, algorithms and publics (Derrida, 1995). Whereas scrap-
books 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 gener-
ally 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

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Good 561

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 capabili-
ties, 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 devel-
oped 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 com-
monly 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’

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562 new media & society 15(4)

their social links. boyd and Ellison define SNS as ‘web-based services that allow indi-
viduals 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 trav-
erse 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 illus-
trations 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 nine-
teenth century. Known most widely as autograph albums, these recreational items ranged
from commercially produced blank books with embossed covers to hand-bound card-
board 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 con-
tacts 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 asso-
ciations 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’ per-
sonal media assemblages evolved over time, what remained constant was their value as
symbols of social bonds.

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Good 563

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 tex-
tual 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 per-
sonalized texts, images and videos are exchanged daily between hundreds of millions of
users of different ages and backgrounds. Indeed, the diversification of Facebook’s capa-
bilities amid an accelerating Internet culture is reminiscent of the proliferation of scrap-
books 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

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564 new media & society 15(4)

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 peri-
odicals 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 nine-
teenth century, following developments in steam-powered printing, embossing, chromo-
lithography 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 tex-
tual 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 chromo-
lithographed 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 dissemi-
nation 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 capi-
talism 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 informa-
tion. Helfand (2008) describes a 1921 scrapbook called A Girl’s Graduation Days, one
of countless scrapbook-related products marketed to young women, which included vari-
ous student-specific section headings like ‘Class Prophecy’, ‘Interclass Debates,’ and ‘Candy

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Good 565

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 origi-
nally reserved for ‘Plays’ (Helfand, 2008: 21). The frequency with which users went
against commercial recommendations within scrapbooks presents a problem for research-
ers, 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 oppos-
ing 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 some-
thing (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 con-
nection 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 con-
sumer’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 scrap-
books reflected the societal shift towards heavier mediation. Historians and archivists
note that early twentieth-century scrapbooks showed signs of people attempting to man-
age the massive flows of media in their lives, in ways that would, much later in the cen-
tury, 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 refash-
ion 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 medi-
ated 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

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566 new media & society 15(4)

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 plat-
forms’ 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 capi-
tal refers to one’s accumulated knowledge about society, and is obtained through educa-
tion 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 under-
stood 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 dimen-
sion 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

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Good 567

to Facebook need not disqualify it as a space of social performance. Historical studies sug-
gest that scrapbooks, and related personal media forms, were created not simply for safe-
keeping 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.

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568 new media & society 15(4)

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 scrap-
book 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 poten-
tially 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 cen-
tury, 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 con-
notations of class-climbing, self-improvement and cultural uplift. Scrapbooks helped peo-
ple visualize ‘the good life’, lending expression to their media-driven fantasies of fine
homes, international travel, improved physical appearance and desires for specific con-
sumer products. Like a customizable handbook for negotiating one’s place in an increas-
ingly 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 prob-
lematic 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 scrap-
books and Facebook are strongly associated with women and youth − two groups histori-
cally 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 surveil-
lance, scrutinizing and ‘reading’ the bodies and faces of others − from middle-class fam-
ily 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’

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Good 569

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 dif-
ficult 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 tradi-
tions 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, liter-
ary 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 sug-
gested 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 per-
sonal and cultural archive. There is a growing concern that online activities are supplant-
ing 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

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570 new media & society 15(4)

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 con-
cerns about data access and ownership. As digital communications become more instanta-
neous 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 addi-
tion of the ‘timeline’ to individual profiles, however, presents an opportunity to examine
how users’ archival behaviors might change with the new design. While Facebook cur-
rently allows users to download copies of their profiles and photos for their own safe-
keeping, 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 alto-
gether. 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

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Good 571

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 evi-
dence’ regarding their self-representations, and present a kind of ‘selective oblivious-
ness’ 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, struc-
turing 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.

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
1. Other major social media sites, like Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Pinterest, may consist of a
more diverse mix of known contacts and strangers.
2. Publishers, too, relied on scrapbooking techniques to manage media flows in the mid to late
nineteenth century. Newspapers and periodicals regularly picked up and recirculated printed
material from other sources, sometimes dropping the author’s name or altering the work.
It was also common for amateurs to publish scrapbooks created from clippings of mass-
produced reading materials (Garvey, 2006a: 160, 164). These practices highlight the diversity
of ideas about authorship and attribution that informed scrapbooking in the past, and which
remain relevant to debates about social media and the ethics of ‘posting’, ‘retweeting’ or
‘curating’ online content created or discovered by others (see www.curatorscode.org).

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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 exam-
ine the rise of amateur internationalist media programs in American schools between
World War I and World War II.

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