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Looking at Facebook through the Rear Window
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I see you... but you cant see me!

After surveying profile pictures, I have come the conclusion that most "apropriate" profiles pictures fit within one of a few categories, based on users comments on the pictures. The spontaneous, in-the-moment pictures are the most common. Relational pictures, espcially with a friend or two, are frequent. Pictures with family members are not very popular, except among adult users, where it is exteremly popular. Finally, formal pictures are OK, but only if there's a good reason, such as an event like graduation, or posing for a friend who is becoming a photographer. In the following analysis, I will show you a set of 10 pictures that I think represent a lot of Facebook pictures to show how these aformentioned categories are especially prevelent on Facebook. All of these pictures had at least two comments by friends of the users. This was part of my criteria in choosing these pictures. While I will not focus on the comments, just know that they were commented on.

The first picture I am going to discuss is the picture that is currently the profile picture on this page. Do you see how fuzzy (poor quality) this picture is? This indicates that it was spontaneously shot, and not carefully chosen, showing that this person is being viewed as more "natural," yet clearly a side of them that they like, becuase it is not natural to just stand still and smile off to the distance, or even at someone. It looks almost like staged-natural. It is natural in the since that it is fuzzy, the person is not looking at the camera, and it appears to be taken in the moment. However, it shows the persons "good side" in that it clearly shows his face, and his face looks pleasant, and not like you would just see it normally. This supports my hypothesis that spontaneous picture are more popular than formal, head shot sort of pictures.


Another picture of this same user shows some of the same qualities, though slightly different. Here, we see the man also in a fuzzy picture, but this time he is standing and looking at the camera. The background behind him could indicate that he was posing for the pictue so that it would have a more "formal" quality, but the every-day clothes, not matching hat and strange position in front of the RV signal that this is probably not the case. Whether this guy was posing for his picture to be a profile picture or not, it has an informal feeling and an in-the-moment feeling, with the RV and casual clothes.

The image on the right is one of my personal favorites. Here is a man looking very "gangsta" as one of his friend commented on his picture. Yet, where is this cool gangasta takign his picture? Yep. Your eyes do not decieve you. He is in a bathroom, and not just any bathroom, a department store bathroom (or some other comercial building) as you can see in the uncropped picture below. I found this picture in his profile ablum, but it was soon (within minutes) replaced by the cropped one. I guess the diper changer took away from looking cool in the way he thought he looked cool.

These two picture were accompanied by pictures saying that he looked like a gangster. Yet, this picture is still presented as being spontaneous and in-the-moment, as it is unlikely that a person plans to go to the mall to take a profile picture in the store bathroom. It is spontaneous, yet shows a distinct "look". These picture are quite frequent on Facebook. Look at this one on the left, for example. This is clearly at a table or a store, yet he is dressed like a gangster, again showing the hand symbols that show a look. While he may be a gangster, it is unlikely considering that his friends commented saying things indicating that he was "looking" cool or like a particular celebrity that looked like a gangster. As we can see, "looks" are approprate within the spontaneous, in-the-moment pictures.

"Look" are very important on Facebook. So important, that we see people putting pictures of celebrities that they are supposed to "look" like. This picture to the left of Aubrey Heburn was uploaded by a college aged woman. She recieved three commentents saying, "Yep. I can see it," "You look so much alike!" and "I can see it. You're beautiful and she's beautiful." This is an interesting phenonmenon that is prevent in many different ways on Facebook, including direct references to people such as this one to more sublte forms as the previous picture of the person who "looks like a gangster." However, the second type is not a formal picture, where a person professionally poses to look like someone or something else. Instead, they are more informal, in the moment pictures.

While many of the profile pictures on Facebook represent spontaneous moments, it is unrealistic to say that all of them are or even that those are the pictures that are most approprate, especially if appropriateness is based on comments. For example, one trend that wasn't present in my album but was frequent enough to mention was the presence of professional pictures. These pictures were often of graduating seniors, such as the gentleman to the left. There were a lot of comments on this picture, especially females telling him he looked "handsome," and "good looking." Other graduation pictures have many similar comments. Other professional or formal pictures that I noticed were pictures during photoshoots, either becuase the person being photograhped was trying out modeling or was posing for a photographer friend. These almost always recieve both explaination by the user and many comments from friends. However, these were not the most frequent pictures that I noticed.

Although formal pictures were not common among most Facebook users, they were very common among certain genres of users, espcially uers over the age of 30. Like a subculture on Facebook, this group is made up of "parents" (as most Facebook users call them... in their langauge saying "do you befriend parents?" Meaning anyone who is "old," or likely married and capable of having kids). "Parents" frequently upload formal pictures or family pictures, such as the one on the right. This genre of users are usually not very comfortable with technology, as this user indicated. In the comments, one of her sons wrote and said that it was "not OK" with him that he wasn't in the family picture that she made as her profile picture. She commented back that she just used the picture another son uploaded, becasue she didn't know how to do it, accompanied by multiple apologies.
Although some college students, young adults and highschool students use pictures with siblings or parents as their profile pictures, it is fairly uncommon. I didn't see any young person with a family portrait as their profile. However, there were very few adults who had pictures without family members. Adults were also most likely to comment on pictures that included family members, whether in their family or not. In a picture that I saw of a college student with his sister, three of the four comments were by adults saying things like "Oh how cute" and "y'all look so much a like" or "look like your dad." As it is frequent for adults to get on Facebook and unite with people they haven't communicated with in years, sometime the picture can be an indicator of the change. For example, sometimes people want to see how the family has changed. In the picture on the right, there were a few adult users who commented asking who the little boy was. The user commented back that it was her son. Obviously, this is not a little boy. Although we don't know his age, he certainly has been around for more than a few years. For this reason, it became apparent that the person commenting hadn't seen them in a while (which became evident further down on the thread). This is an interesting demention to Facebook albums. I frequently uploaded pictures with another friend or sibling. In my experience, many of my family members commented on pictures of me with my sibilings. Others who were frequent were people who I hadn't seen in a while, such as friends from elementary and middel school. Usually, they would say something like, "your little sister looks so much like you!" or something to that effect.

In this analysis, I have shown with these pictures that the most "appropriate" pictures on Facebook are ones that are supposed to seem spontaneous or in the moment. Pictures are supposed to represent someone's personality, even if that personality "looks" like someone else. However, more formal pictures and pictures with family have their place for specific purposes and users.



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