I decided that I wanted to focus my project on the difference in profile pictures between my most-used social media apps, Tumblr and Facebook.
To collect profile pictures from Tumblr, I randomly chose 26 from the people I follow. To collect profile pictures from Facebook, I chose from the my friends list going the first girl to the next guy to the next girl after that and so on. I copied the images into Google Sheets and then annotated the images looking at how many people in the photo, whether male or female, and whether the image was abstract or realistic.
As I started to collect profile photos, I quickly realized that a large portion of Tumblr profile photos are more abstract, being works of art rather than photos of the person they are representing. It didn't matter whether male or female, only 9/25 profile pictures contained the user's face in realistic photo. Vastly different compared to the 21/25 profile pictures from Facebook. Which makes sense to me. Tumblr is about creating a blog that allows you to post whatever you want anonymously. Users are able to truly write and post about what they really like and think without the backlash of being judged or told your opinions are invalid by people you know.
However, although Tumblr far exceeds in the abstract photos category, Facebook has more people per photo. 24/25 Tumblr photos contain only one person or object compared to Facebook where only 9/25 contained one person or object.
It was also interesting to me that these numbers were basically the same when comparing women and men. In the pool of profile pictures from Tumblr, only 9/25 were male but still only 3/9 had realistic photos. And from Facebook, 13/25 were male but still only 4/13 had photos containing only one person.
So what do these numbers mean?
To me, these numbers show that we as people like anonymity. On Tumblr where its acceptable to use a photo that is a drawing as a profile picture, only 1/3 of people that I selected chose to use a realistic picture. And on Facebook, where using a drawing is much less common, people choose to hide themselves among others as seen by only 1/3 of people choosing to use a single person profile picture. Compare this to Tumblr, where people who have the anonymity of an abstract profile picture choose to use a photo with a single object/person. We want anonymity but also want to be known. We don't want to be a group of people, we want to be us and express our ideas but we also want to hide and shelter ourselves in being unknown.