What My Facebook Says About Me, According to Me...
After taking Intro to Visual Culture (with Kayla), I could never look at Facebook or online profiles the same. It’s not to say that I downright stopped using them, but the extent to which I could thoroughly express myself through them kind of went down the drain. Why so sudden? Learning an entire semester’s worth of material about why we as humans will be, and always have been, obsessed with: the gaze, fetishizing eachother, the panopticon and the entire concept of the voyeur is kind of taxing on the nineteen year old psyche. Especially when that nineteen year old is pretty involved with images. My dad is a professional photographer and ever since birth I have had to get over the concept of being ‘camera shy’. Test shoots, documenting, he loved taking artsy cute little pictures of me and my family through our entire childhood into teens. As much as I don’t want to admit it, this definitely had its effect on me and how much I wanted to portray to the outside world through images.
I don’t feel very limited by the profile structure, I think that if anything could better portray me, that would freak me out. Once again back to the visual. I think where I try to give my audience (basically friends, family and the occasional new people I let into my life) the best idea of what they are going to get with my online persona, is in my pictures. I’m a kind of an annoying de-tagger. I don’t want a million pictures of me doing the exact same thing, and at this point in my life, I am really sick of getting my picture taken. My dad kind of screwed me on that one. But, I think this has allowed me to get more out of pictures than anywhere else on the profile. I don’t have ridiculous profile pictures, nor do I really give anyone a great idea of what I ACTUALLY look like. I kind of tell a story in them. I don’t keep more than 12-15 profile pictures up and all of them in some way, help describe my life. A lot of nature, a lot of good old friends, there’s my mom and my dog in a skype snapshot, a picture of me and my cat when I was 7, another picture of my cat in my kitchen, a third picture of my cat…oh gosh. Anyways, all the pictures are in some way or another, beautiful in my eyes. Either the scenery, the people in it or the place. It’s kind of my life in a very small nutshell, which I am okay with. People know me and if they don’t, that’s alright too. I don’t think anything about my Facebook profile will make or break anything.
Lastly, I don’t often revise the contents of my Facebook profile. Last I told the class, I was going through the process of figuring out if I was going to become “In A Relationship” with my boyfriend or not. Turns out, I caved. That’s really the only time I have changed my profile for a life event, but it is recent so I guess I should think about that. I am not one to ever really do the relationship status thing, it’s been about 3 years since I was actually Facebook official with anyone other than, like, my best friend. I think I am, hopefully, reaching a point in my somewhat adult life where I don’t care what people know and don’t know. My mom did tell me that it takes a lot of time to really not care what the 'other thinks, and I know I’ve got years to go, but I am going to just start to try WORKING on that. Because I think that’s what can get us all at the end of the day. Stressing about what people see and don’t see, care and don’t care about on all of our weird avatar Facebooks can cause lots of unnecessary drama. It’s weird but it is completely natural. People are our mirrors to ourselves sometimes, and at other times it really doesn't matter.
~Sophie