Outcome

Although I use and go on Facebook everyday, I don't produce much content on the social media platform. I've had an account since 2008, but most of my profile pictures since that time were not of me. I once had a picture of myself covering my face with a hand, so as not to reveal my face. The profile picture I have now is the only one that clearly shows my face. I last changed it in November, and I hadn't planned on changing it for a while.

Since I don't put that much content on Facebook, I think I need to change my profile picture to something drastic or something that is usually not expected of me, because otherwise I won't get much of a reaction from others.

To make this a bit humorous, I will change my profile picture to a picture of Donald Trump, because most of my friends do not support him. Hopefully, making this change will be strange enough to elicit response from people I don't normally interact with on Facebook. I'd like to see how they react, especially since I don't usually concern myself with political matters and make my views known.

After deciding to change my profile picture to Donald Trump, I went to Google Images and searched “donald trump”. Browsing through the images, I realized that perhaps changing my profile picture to just a picture of Donald Trump might not be drastic enough to induce a response from my friends on Facebook.

So instead, I changed my search to “trump 2016”. By purposely going with an image that maybe would convince people I actually supported Trump, I might get more responses. The first image that appealed to me said “TRUMP 2016” in big, bold letters.

People looking at my profile picture would obviously be able to read the words in my photo. However, because the picture was not in the size of a square, cropping the photo to fit into the Facebook’s profile picture icon size would make the image a bit confusing to look at.

So I went for another image that was in the size of a square.

Now that I finally had a picture I wanted to use, I needed to wait for the right time to change my picture. I waited until 10PM on Saturday to change my picture, since I had 136 friends online, which is about one third of the friends I have on Facebook.

I also took note of how many friends I had at the time, to see if I would lose any Facebook friends due to my profile picture change.

I initially was going to keep the Donald Trump picture for only an hour, but I didn’t have many responses, so I decided to wait a little longer. Interestingly enough, I was confronted in person by some people who questioned my profile picture change.

The first response I received was from my roommate. I was washing the dishes when I heard her say, “Vicki! Why?” At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about. She then said, “I’m so confused!” I finally realized she had notice the change, and I started laughing. I decided not to explain my reasons to her until I changed it back, so I just told her I would explain it to her later.

The next response I received was from my neighbors. One of them said jokingly to me, “Vicki! I’m so offended. My people will never forgive you.” The other said, “Honestly I’m not offended by it. It’s just funny.”

Over the duration of the next few hours, I received some more responses that weren’t in person.

One of my close friends took it upon herself to ask me to explain why I had changed my profile picture to Donald Trump. She had also commented on my profile picture, believing that someone else had changed it instead of me. She didn’t think I had done it myself, of my own will.

Surprisingly, I got a few likes, and not surprisingly, some comments as well.

Some of my closer friends simply liked the picture, but I also had some people I normally don’t talk to on Facebook like it, which I was surprised by. People generally made comments that I think meant they thought I had changed my picture ironically, or as a joke. Some others were confused, which made sense, since I don’t normally change my picture on Facebook. I also received a comment that might have meant the commenter thought I was being serious. But since the comment was made over the Internet, I can’t be sure. No one unfriended me either, probably because they didn't think I was being serious.

I learned that trying to analyze comments and likes on Facebook can be difficult because people may have different motives behind them. Also, sarcasm and humor is hard to convey and sense over the Internet. Generally, I believe I can assume that my friends thought I was joking, because they knew I would not be the type of person to support Trump, and I am generally witty and sarcastic. Because they knew my personality, they didn’t take the change seriously. However, at the same time, what if I did actually support Trump? They would never be able to know. People took what they knew about me and applied it to my change. But there are many things people don’t know about me, and they still assumed they could understand my motives.

Many people might know me externally, and presume things of me that may or may not be true. They apply their own judgments to me. If I were another person, the responses would have been different. If I were to do this differently, I would try to think of something else that might be controversial but could be possible about me, from another person’s point of view. In this case, others believed it impossible that I would actually support Donald Trump. But if it were something else that people wouldn’t be able to assume anything about, perhaps I could have received a wider range of responses from my friends on Facebook.