Profile Pictures for an Audience

In a World of Me Me Me

Although I did encounter friends that used their profile picture selfies to express their political opinions (especially in the wake of the rainbow colored pro-gay marriage digital storm), hobbies (or is it just a case of the I'm-having-more-fun-than-you?), and beliefs, most of the pictures were just zoomed in head shots. I did not find a profile picture with more than three people in it. So for whom are all these selfies? Is it a personal statement or a show for an audience? 

I chose to examine the relationship between the Facebook profile pictures that people choose for themselves and their number of friends. I looked at the pictures of 50 of my friends - chosen randomly based on the Newsfeed or Messenger availability - of which 22 are male and 28 are female. The two main aspects I examined are: the correlation of the number of friends and the number of likes on the person's current profile picture, and the number of friends and the number of times the profile picture has been updated or modified in 2015 so far. Note: I realize that one of the flaws in my experiment is that the timeline of likes/picture changes does not match that of Facebook friends; in other words, a person could have potentially scored lower on the friends category due to the recent creation of the account. These results should also not be used to extrapolate due to the small sample size.

I was surprised. I, who relates selfies to cries for attention, expected profile pictures to command attention proportional to the time their owner's had invested in building their social friend pool. I had hypothesized that the more Facebook friends the more likes due to higher 'popularity'. Are not likes supposed to amount to currency on Facebook? Alas, this does not seem to be the case. Perhaps the reason that people with less friends get more likes is that these friends will tend to be closer (think hand-picked) to the account owner and hence more likely to interact (via a like) with their online lives. The graph also shows that women are more likely to garner likes and that most people have 'limited' (used relatively as I doubt even a few of us know 500 people well) friend circles.  

This was another surprise. I had thought that people with a higher number of friends would change their profile pictures more frequently to keep their audiences entertained. Again, however, most of the 'action' takes place from between 400 and 1000 friends. It is also rare for either gender to change their profile picture more than 5 times a year. My new theory: I would have to analyze the amount of posts people share, photos they upload, videos they share, and so on in order to get a better understanding of whether Facebook account holders do what they do to get and keep the attention of other friends. A profile picture might be too broadly broadcast throughout Facebook, and thus require a timely and careful selection and editing process, to frequently change. 

Maybe, however, Facebook selfies are more for the person than the audience. It is his or her little self-contained, perfect vision of him- or herself.