Facebook Profile Pictures

This may be more relevant later in the semester, but this just popped in my head and I thought it would be worthwhile to the class at some point.

So today, the first item on my newsfeed on Facebook was that 26 of my friends had changed their profile picture. This isn’t that big a number, but considering these news stories pop up every day or so, we, the people of Facebook, change our profile picture way more than necessary. This got me thinking, why do we feel the need to change this picture so many times? We don’t change other, far more official pictures of ourselves nearly as often; in the three years I have had Facebook I have had 30 profile pictures, but in the five years I have had a driver’s license I haven’t changed the picture a single time. The same holds true for me passport, my school I.D. card and essentially every representation of me not on the internet. So why do we change our profile pictures so often? It’s not because we change appearances. I certainly didn’t change much between September 1st and October 1st in 2007, but I had five different profile pictures in that time span. I think we change our pictures so often because of a merit system. We want to reward important memories, happy moments, or simply a really good hair day and we do so by allowing pictures of these worthy moments to be our representation to our network of friends, family, and peers. Moments that are especially important to us stay up for longer, until enough time has passed that its import has faded and pictures from a recent important event inspire us to recognize a new moment. A photo from my last world championships in November, 2008 remained my picture until June, 2009 because it represented one of the most important moments of my life. Often, the moments that inspire us are nostalgic rather than new. For instance, the photo that replaced the world championship photo was a year old photo of me and some friends, a change inspired by the fact that I was home for the summer and missed my closest friends from school. The reason we feel the need to update this picture is the social aspect of Facebook. We want to show everyone what moments are important to us, and the profile picture is a quick way of keeping those closest to us updated in our life. They say a picture says a thousand words, but on Facebook a picture says those thousand words to the thousand people closest to you, allowing us to easily express ourselves to everyone who cares.