Hipsters unite
It’s a small, cool world after all on Friendster.com
Last week graduate student Peach Friedman was waiting to buy a cup of coffee when musician Lauren Hoffman appeared in line behind her. “Hey, I saw you on Friendster,” Hoffman said.
“Friendster” has recently entered the local lexicon to define a member of the online network Friendster.com, where buddies are collected and swapped like baseball cards. The site’s “friend of a friend” concept is similar to John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, which itself spawned the Kevin Bacon game and which posits that everyone is connected by six or fewer intermediary relationships.
Friedman, for example, joined Friendster in the spring––just weeks after the site’s March debut––on the invitation of her brother, who lives in Boston. After joining, typing a personality profile and uploading a photo, she “linked” to the other Friendsters in her brother’s network. Friedman has invited others into her Internet circle, and through her 31 Friendsters she is currently connected to 264,311 other people, including other Charlottesvillians like Hoffman.
“All my Boston friends were on Friendster,” says Friedman. “They were all writing ridiculous testimonials about each other, and I wanted to join the fun. I love to talk about myselfI mean, who doesn’t?”
Friendster’s format of pictures, profiles and prominent declarations of status (single, in a relationship, married, etc.) has prompted comparisons to the dating website Match.com, which has about 200 male and 200 female users in the Charlottesville area. Friendster’s home page claims the site helps people find love, as well as new friends and activity partners. The site is currently in a free trial period.
According to Friendster’s “search” function, there are 692 Friendsters living within 10 miles of Charlottesville. Of the 351 women, 81 want to meet people for “dating” or a “serious relationship.” And of the men, 132 of 341 are looking for love. In contrast to Match.com’s sincere solicitations, however, many Friendsters seem less interested in meeting new people than simply declaring their existence to the wide world, and making it laugh.
Indeed, many local Friendsters do not take their profiles too seriously. Local web designer Darren Hoyt, for example, claims his occupation is herding incontinent, flying sheep. Other profiles are completely fabricated––the City of Charlottesville, the Belmont neighborhood, Axl Rose and Rubick’s Cube are all on Friendster. The site’s apparently humorless founder and CEO, Jonathan Abrams, however, has denounced “fakesters” as ruining Friendster, and has begun deleting phony accounts.
The site’s levity, however, is appealing to many local Friendsters. Robin Stevens says she’s not interested in using Friendster for anything other than fleeting entertainment.
“I’m not on it in hopes someone is going to read my profile and say ‘I gotta meet this woman,’” says Stevens. “They will more than likely say, ‘What a weirdo.’ I think it’s just another platform to say ‘Here I am! I’m neat and cool! Look at me! I’m different!’ It was fun setting up the profile and reading everyone else’s ramblings about themselves, but after that I was over it.”
Browsing the site reveals a Friendster archetype that holds true among Charlottesville’s members––mostly white, cool-looking, 20-something urban hipsters effusing irony, a declared love for hip-hop, indie pop and “The Simpsons.”
The symmetry doesn’t surprise UVA anthropologist Richard Handler, who explains Friendster’s appeal by referencing 19th century scholar Alexis de Tocqueville:
“Tocqueville pointed out that a fundamental problem of mass, individualistic societies is that the very independence and equality that gives every person his or her dignity also means that every person is no different than anyone else––what I call the ‘drop in the bucket’ feeling,” says Handler. “He showed how American individualism led to American conformity. That’s exactly what you are finding on Friendster.com, where everyone expresses his or her individuality, but in exactly the same way.”
Some find Friendster’s conformity a turn-off. “I’ve managed to avoid the Friendster pull so far,” says 23-year-old C-VILLE intern Nell Boeschenstein. “It seems like just another one of those things that defines you by a list of your consumptions.”
It’s all in fun for Friedman, though, a habitual people-watcher who enjoys Friendster’s personality parade––especially when she meets her Internet acquaintances face-to-face.
“It’s just another medium to play with, a place to see and be seen,” she says, “like the person who comes up and says ‘I saw you on Friendster.’”––John Borgmeyer
A church divided
The consecration of an openly gay bishop spurs local debate
After a summer when “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” ruled the ratings and the Supreme Court ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional, it’s easy to forget that homosexuality still inspires debate. But reminders don’t come much clearer than the international controversy surrounding the Episcopal Church’s confirmation of the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican Communion.
The story broke in June when Robinson, 56—a former married man with two daughters—was elected to lead the Diocese of New Hampshire. Debate flared up again when the election was ratified at the American Anglican Council’s national convention on August 5. On Sunday, November 2, Robinson was consecrated as a bishop at the University of New Hampshire in front of nearly 4,000 people, most of them supporters. Only three objected during the public comment period—one of whom read an explicit list of gay sex acts—although other dissenting members left the church afterward to join a protesting prayer service nearby.
But his official overall acceptance by the 2.3 million-member American Anglican Church has caused a deep divide among Episcopalians worldwide, with rumors of a split between the liberal and conservative sides of the membership. Local congregants also have strong opinions on the matter, and C-VILLE asked a few churchgoers whether a person’s sexual preference makes a difference within the religious community.
Jessica Nash, on her way out of a morning service at Christ Church on High Street, candidly said, “I’m very against the decision…part of being a Christian is the belief that Christ can transform you.” Her companions nodded in agreement, supporting the written statement from the conservative congregation’s vicar, the Rev. Jeffrey Fishwick: “I, and I suspect most of the parishioners of Christ Church, are deeply grieved over the decision.”
By telephone, Dave Johnson, rector at Church of Our Savior on E. Rio Road, offered a less emotional reaction. On September 24, Church of Our Savior hosted a two-hour forum on the topic where parishioners and priests expressed vastly differing opinions. He seemed less concerned with controversy than on focusing on the purpose of practicing religion. “I don’t agree with the decisions that were made,” he admits, adding, however, that the issue is “an unfortunate distraction from the message of the gospel.”
Robert Williams, a local Episcopalian, said that “Being a Christian means belonging to a community that goes back thousands of years. When someone challenges a moral-based history, there’s going to be a split. Moral conviction should stay timeless.” His sister, Anne Williams, agreed. “Where in the Bible does it say you can have a homosexual as a priest?”
“Acceptance of a leader who happens to be gay is a better reflection of true Christianity,” argued Eleanor Takseraas, outside of St. Paul’s Episcopal Campus Ministry on University Avenue, “in the sense that you’re not turning your back on someone who’s not like you.”
The Rev. Jonathan Voorhees describes St. Paul’s as “a progressive church” and doesn’t consider this issue political—“it’s a human issue,” he said. Voorhees regards the existence of homosexuals, within the church or otherwise, as neither evil nor uncommon.
Other Episcopalians are ambivalent, like Cary Wood, who regularly attends evening service. He just wants the situation resolved. “I have no reason to be against [homosexuals],” he said. “It’s a shame such a big deal is being made out of it.”—Athena Schindelheim
Everyday people
Scottsville’s ordinary folks live on through recorded memories
A plain-faced woman in a billowing black gown is reunited, in a sense, with her husband, a bearded Scottsville Gray in full military regalia. Steps away in the 157-year-old Scottsville Museum building, their life-sized images co-mingle with photos of a silver-haired Yankee educator and a curious 4-year-old girl in black boots and a white ruffled dress. They are there only in pictures, yet through the efforts of “Capturing our Heritage,” Scottsville Museum’s oral history project, their stories live on through the voices of their friends and family.
Funded in part by a $2,500 grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (the people who bring you the annual Virginia Festival of the Book), the program directly feeds the museum’s “Whispers from the Past” exhibit, which currently tells the story of nine Scottsville citizens from the pre-Civil War era to the Depression. The exhibit, located at 290 Main St., continues into a second year with a new series of profiles to be mounted in April.
“Scottsville is a unique town. It seems to have a kind of continuous history,” says Charles Fry, director of the oral history initiative, which actually got underway about four years ago and now has the memories of nearly 50 people to its credit. “I think that we need to tap into that and get a handle on memories of people who are, I’m sorry, dying.” For Fry, a former psychologist, the main motivation for spearheading the project was to explore the extraordinary in the average Scottsville resident. “A number of people had tried to interview a variety of well known older people such as the mayor,” Fry says. “But one of the things that seemed to be important to try was to get some historical understanding of the everyday person, not just the ‘celebrities.’”
Outfitted with a microphone and a digital audio recorder, project volunteers gather those histories. Yet it’s the photos, especially those by William Burgess, which give the museum exhibit its inimitable texture.
From 1890 to 1935 Burgess was to Scottsville what Rufus Holsinger was to Charlottesville, a photo historian. Through a “gentleman’s agreement,” their paths never crossed as they worked their separate parts of Albemarle County. The museum project has accumulated about 3,700 of Burgess’ archival quality images, although he took thousands more.
Along with the photos and other artifacts, the oral histories are arranged around six audio pods, giving visitors a mixed-media glimpse into the little town’s rich yet sometimes troubled past. Listening to the “voices from the beyond” on the decidedly low-tech audio tapes, viewing the still-vivid photos, standing on the sturdy floorboards of the Museum (a former Disciples of Christ Church founded in 1846), and smelling the musty aroma of artifacts like a 1920s diary and a yellowed quilt effectively transports a viewer briefly back in time.
Here the anguished histories of Civil War soldier David Patteson and his wife, Mollie—both born in the 1830s—are told through the voices of two of their living grandchildren, who read the letters and poetry the couple exchanged while David, a Confederate, was away at war until his death in March 1865. Then there’s Ruth Roberts, born in 1904, who was a former World War II War Department employee, and later a retiree who traveled the world but always returned home to Scottsville. Or William Day Smith, who was principal of Scottsville School for 30 years until 1937 and whose story is told through the voice of his niece, Katherine Ellis.
“This is an oral history of you and me, the run of the mill,” Fry says. “I think this is a side of history that you don’t tend to get. You usually get Thomas Jefferson’s history or other well-known people. But this is just an oral history of people.”—Jennifer Pullinger