Outcome

What constitutes a profile? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a profile is defined as a representation of something in outline. We create many profiles for ourselves on social media. By creating a profile on Facebook, for example, everything we choose to like, share, or comment slowly builds up our profiles, and how others view us. Of course, we can always choose to change the privacy settings of certain actions, and so only what we show to others is how we choose to portray ourselves. Probably the most prevalent way of displaying ourselves on a social media website is by choosing a profile picture. The picture engages sight, which is the most commonly used sense. By looking at someone's profile picture, we can maybe hope to understand what that person is like.

I decided to select profile pictures from my friends on Facebook, because it is the only social media website I use in which I have at least fifty friends. By choosing Facebook, I knew I would probably be getting mostly profile pictures of the people themselves, unlike other social media channels, which may have lesser chances of profile pictures that are actually of the people themselves.

I went to my own profile page to get the profile pictures of the first fifty friends who appeared on my list, knowing that the list is somewhat sorted by how close you are with people on Facebook, or at least by how much content you share with each other and by how much you interact.

Link to spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MaatyJY9dDYDDCLLpkh1SQg18NCZPI0TgMQ3X7Wz_sA/edit?usp=sharing

I initially couldn't decide how to analyze the fifty profile pictures I'd collected, so I started off with a general list of categories: bright, dark, single person, multiple people, headshot, waistshot, full body, scenery, illustration, not real people, looking into camera, not looking into camera, and candid. Organizing the pictures in these categories made me realize how many of them were headshots or waistshots, and of people looking directly into the camera. Generally, however, this is desired, because it's easier to identify people by seeing their faces clearly. For example, if I'm scrolling through my chat bar, it's filled with profile pictures. It is easier for me to find who I'm looking for if their profile picture is easily recognizable by their face.

However, there are a few people who choose not to use their own faces as profile pictures. They either use illustrations, or scenery, or no profile picture at all, choosing to go with the default Facebook profile picture. I decided to find out if people who have more bright, close up pictures of their faces are more likely to flesh out their profiles on Facebook by looking at the number of likes and photos they had (of which I could see) as well as if they had made a status update within the last week.

I came to realize, however, that the recent status update was not a good way to measure profile portrayal, because most people, even if they are active on Facebook by other means (sharing, liking, commenting), may not post status updates often.

I discovered that people with brighter profile pictures with close ups of their faces are not any more likely to have more likes and photos than those without bright profile pictures of their faces. While profile pictures on Facebook can reveal some information about a person, it is not the whole picture. Rather, it is only one part of who a person is. A profile picture is part of a person's profile, and to find out more about a person, we must look deeper. In fact, a person's actions on social media is only one side of a person. At some point, we reach a limit to connecting with someone on social media, and it becomes better to talk with someone face to face, rather than staring at a screen with someone's profile picture on it.