Outcome

Intention: Just like Erving Goffman said, rules are actions that are approved by a lot of people and are practiced over time. For everyone of us, the way we present our online self is defined by ourselves and approved by our friends online. Everyone has a style and, as we are growing older, it's getting harder and harder to change and thus we have our own rule of online presentation. Our online friends are clearly got used to our own rules and thus I'm going to present this question: what will happen if I break my own rule? What kind of reaction I'm expect from my friends online and actually get from them? Out of what reason are they behaving like this? And after I explain everything, are they still having the shock or they are back to normal? As I never ever get a selfie before and post it online, I will give myself a selfie that break every single rule against the way I choose my online profile photo. I'm going to take screenshots about people who are responding and then interview them and explain my "experiment" later.

Process and products: Starting from the morning of Saturday, September. 19th, I took a picture at the karate training room by using a mirror with a karate position. Here is the original photo.

Then I posted this one onto the "memento" on Wechat, which is the most popular social media my friends and I use. Later that day, I took a selfie (the second picture) and used it as my profile photo. Then I started talking in my Wechat groups (where a lot of my friends can chat with all of us at the same time) and hoping someone's going to notice my profile picture and give me a reaction. This whole process last for 24 hours and on the next noon, I made a post to explain everything and ask for reactions and reflexes. There were few but one challenge I encountered in doing this: the reason I never use selfie as profile photo is that I hate selfie and I very much prefer not to present my face onto social media. So doing this is like "sacrificing" myself.

Effects: 2 hours after my post, I received more than 40 likes and comments. At the time I changed my profile photo and started talking, everyone who saw my photo freaked out. 

These comments are a typical set of reactions. I'm translating most but not all of them: "Seems like you are losing weight~" "AWESOME!" "What the hell are you doing?!" "Did you lose in Truth or Dare?"

Translate: "I just got back from jogging, and your profile photo is a SELFIE?!?!" "I just come back from HW session... and my can't hold my phone tight and it almost falls on the ground..."

Translate: "Guys are not supposed to take selfies lol. That's way I thought you were getting to be a narcissism lollollol."

In Reaction #6 and #7, there are several expected reactions: "Are you just getting a girlfriend?" (there are 5 comments like this in these two photos...) Two of them are "you have changed, is it because you are too longly at pittsburgh?"

Generally, the reactions are what I was expecting because I had that kind of reaction when I took a selfie... Almost all of my close friends reacted to my profile photo or post, even a few from my middle school classmates. 

Reflection: Just as my project title suggest, I break a very simple but critical rule of mine-- never use selfie in social media. This decision not only reflexes my choice of presenting myself on social media, but also reflexes my personality, what kind of person am I. As I change my profile photo, to those who know me well, it's almost the same as I've become a different person, a person that they don't know. The first impression by the post on Saturday morning was a shock, but it's not necessarily the reason they told me that they thought I've become a different guy. It is the change of profile photo that destroyed their position because I kept doing the same weird online behavior. After their denial, it came to the accepting state where they started thinking is it because he was too lonely or at a different country for too long? These are just like what the psychology textbook says so those responses are just as what I expected. In a nutshell, this project helps find out about how critical one's online "rules" are, and how influential when we break our own rules.