At first, I put pictures of landscape, and a baby picture, then uploaded
a range of pictures contemporary shots. There were some silly, some
sweet, some with people and some alone. My last two pictures were of me
smiling at camera in the snow, and of my boyfriend and I posing in front
of a rainbow. Through the pictures, I found a pattern of transitions.
Besides the fact that I physically changed, I also changed the type of
pictures that I put online. While this is likely due in part to the fact
that I have changed as a person, as happens quite rapidly with a lot of
college students, I was compelled to consider if there were alternate
reasons why the pictures might have changed. In order to answer this
question, I asked myself another, perhaps more important question: how
have these pictures changed?
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As I looked at them, I said, "Wow. I've changed a lot. I was really
trying to look cool back then, but now I just put normal pictures up."
However, what is "normal"? Is it based on what I look like most of the
time? If that was the case, why didn't I simply have a candid picture of
me doing something that I do most frequently? I could get a friend to
take a picture of me sleeping, eating, or typing up papers with a
computer in my lap. That would make a great picture, wouldn't it? No. I
have never seen a profile picture of someone doing homework; although
that is what a lot of my friends do a significant amount of time a week.
While there could be a picture of someone doing homework, somewhere on
Facebook, my own experience shows that this is not the case. Even
pictures of people sitting thinking or with facial expressions that they
probably have on their faces the majority of the time are not frequent
profile pictures. This led me to suppose that the quintessentially
"normal" picture on Facebook is not a candid picture that shows a person
in a place they would most likely be found, a natural setting.
So, perhaps more formal pictures are "normal" pictures? No, the common
profile picture is not a formal picture, such as a passport, school
photo or license picture. Not very many pictures of people dressed
nicely, sitting slightly sideways, with hair done and nice clothes on.
No, Facebook profile pictures are not traditional profile pictures.
Although I have seen these types of pictures every once and a while, in
my experience, they were not the norm. When I did see a picture of someone
posing for a profession, head-shot, I usually thought that that was
dorky, or they were trying to prove a point of some sort, or just funny.
When I thought back to how many pictures I saw of that looked professional. I
didn't remember seeing very many other than graduation pictures when
high school students were about to walk the stage, or modeling shots, either when a person poses to help out a photographer friend or when they are trying to get into modeling.
But, in my experiences these were far and few
between. They usually made a big splash, then were replaced quickly. Of
course, my own reflections could be completely disconnected from the
common ideas, but considering the infrequency of head-shot pictures that
I've seen, I guess that others share my sentiment. Professional pictures
seem inappropriate.
Through this journey of considering these opposing
types of pictures, I began to understand that there appropriate place
for specific pictures. There is the appropriate place for a head-shot
and an inappropriate place for a head-shot. Considering this, I began to
wonder what the "appropriate" picture is for a Facebook profile.
Obviously, this is complex considering the variety in profiles. I will show a breif analysis of my own profile pictures. After we see if there are some patterns in mine, we're going to branch out into a broader public range of profile pictures and see how genres in mine might relate to others.
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