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?

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.