Outcome

Where else on the web might identity be more important than say, Facebook?

To be honest, I lie more towards the hiding and lurking side of things on the web when it comes to Internet presence, so asking me to change my profile picture or general visual, virtual representation of myself anywhere other than Facebook would result in an underwhelming amount of attention and remark.

Facebook is more closely linked to the offline social sphere in that it is generally considered an online extension to the offline social world rather than a recreation of it for fictional purposes - there’s usually a much stronger link between our real life persona and our Facebook ones. Hence identity on Facebook is especially important (as opposed to say, a message board or some roleplaying site, or even a personal blog), and impersonation/fake accounts are dealt with zealously by Facebook. What would happen if one were to purposefully alter their exhibited identity, or portray a different persona, especially one that is significantly different from the one people around us are used to? And what about modelling it after another person in a particular social group? Sarah Bien and I are interested in observing the effects of copying each other's style on Facebook with new profile pictures, maybe also with a new cover photo depending.

Here are some possible responses I can imagine receiving:

Chuckling and much amusement by our common friends

Mild confusion, possibly leading to needling questions 

Mirth at poor execution of identity imitation, thinking this is a prank/joke

Most obvious ways of imitation would be exchanging usual clothing and accessories, adopting each other's mannerism and attempting to portray it in a profile picture, etc. Hopefully we will receive notable response from our social circle considering our rather distinct personalities.

Here is my original profile picture, before I changed it for this project. As you might infer, my profile pictures tend to have some questionable content in it, which explains the relatively muted response I received in my first profile picture change.

While originally Sarah and I planned to swap clothing and accessories, taking photos of ourselves, and then using those for the project, that idea didn't end up working out. First of all, we were using the cameras from the friday class, and being not-so-good with them, we ended up taking some rather blurry shots. We did get some videos to use, though, which I'll talk a bit about later - but for our first profile picture change, we just swapped each other's current profile pictures. The other reason is that although we spent a good part of the day going about in each other's clothes and shoes and things, we didn't really get a lot of reaction. A few questions from close friends as to why we'd swapped clothes, but that was about it. This might be partly because I'm known to randomly cross-dress every now and then (actually, I usually go around wearing unisex/clothing for men so ... just "dress"?) so me suddenly wearing a dress wasn't as comment-inducing as it was the first time.

Anyway, here's the results from the first profile picture change:

As you can see, a few friends "liked" the photo, and another just asked if I got hacked, as predicted by one of the comments. Not too surprising, though I was hoping to get comments from more than one person. Seeing that we were not receiving particularly interesting responses from our first profile change, we decided to go for a second one - but this time I decided to use new content. That's right, I took a screenshot from a video we took on the friday class:

Gorgeous. The actual video itself was very charming too, I can't wait for us to start learning video editing to make it shine even more. As one might expect, this profile picture change got me a few more comments than the last one did:

This time I made a few replies to the comments I received, hoping it would turn into more comments... but alas. It just seemed like too much of a joke to seriously hold meaningful conversation over, I suppose. 

I made the third and last profile picture change without really expecting much, and indeed all I got for this change was a few "likes". 

Something I was surprised about was that my brother hadn't made any comments about any of the profile picture changes - perhaps he doesn't see them, or he's too busy to say anything about it, or he just chuckles and scrolls on. Perhaps I should ask him about it. He's the only family member I have friended on Facebook and who regularly uses the social media site, so it might have been more interesting to see his response.

If I had more time and resources for the project I might've been able to make more drastic changes to emulate Sarah's look, like actually coloring my hair, among other things. I wasn't able to actually steal her identity for any significant amount of time either, since the time for the project was rather short. I think there definitely would have been more interesting effects of using each other's photos for the project for an extended period of time, and purposefully misleading others as to our identity, but it seems that won't be for this time.

There /was/ one unexpected part of the project in which I "fooled" someone into my identity, though. I was recently assigned a "little" in the W@SCS organization, so I had "friended" them during the project. It was during the second profile picture's change, no less, which definitely made for a very wrong and inaccurate first impression of my personality (Sarah and I have very distinct personalities at the superficial level). I don't know if this is a side-effect of that, but my little and I have warmed up to each other relatively quickly considering we've never met and know almost nothing about each other. It could just be a coincidence that we're both very chill about the same things and the way we express ourselves, but I think the silly profile picture helped.