Confusing and Non-conforming

Intent (Friday, Noon): 

During the last project I found it interesting how some people used a picture of a piece of artwork or an object as their profile, so I decided to do that for this project.

This is my previous profile picture:

It features me (no glasses) with some of my friends. 

I intend to change it to a picture including an anime character, which is out of character for me as I don't watch anime.

I think the caption you give is also part of the profile picture, because you look at it at the same time. Usually my captions are pretty boring. For this project, I'm thinking of putting a stronger message in my caption that might confuse people or incite a reaction. 

I'm curious to see how people respond to a confusing profile picture change. Will they ignore it or respond to it? How so? I expect for people that aren't close to me to be confused, and my friends to pass it off as another weird thing that I'm doing. I don't think that people that aren't close to me will comment, and I think my friends will like it.

Process:

Now I started thinking about what I could choose as my profile picture. I first looked up the phrase "anime girl", but none of the images gave off the loud, attention grabbing feel that I was going for.

So drawing from my knowledge of children's anime (I'm Japanese) I chose one with lots of girls in brightly colored, garish clothing.

I chose the third image as it had a good view of their faces. 

Next, I thought about the caption. My first thought was to say that I loved the show, and pretend that I was an obsessed fan, but I knew my friends wouldn't believe that. So I thought about what the image was trying to convey. I think the image shows off how there are a lot of cute girls in this series. This lead me to decide that I wanted to come out to my friends that are unsure of my preferences. I've seen incredibly long text posts of people coming out to their entire friends list on Facebook, and although I understand that, it never seemed like a "me" way to do it. I wanted it to still sound like me and also be vague enough that it only had meaning to my friends.

Product (Friday, 8pm):

I cropped the picture to fit in the square shape of the profile picture and added my caption. Aside from saying that I like cute girls, I decided to clear it up and say that I don't watch anime. To others, my caption may seem confusing, but it felt like a right decision because it supports my intention to convey a message to my friends. It's how I normally talk on the internet so I thought it would help my friends understand what someone wasn't making me do this as a dare or using my account to make a joke. 

This is my profile picture right after I updated it:

Effect (Sunday, 8pm):

I got the same number of comments from other people for both pictures, 4. In my last picture it was mostly my friends showing support for the picture. For the new picture, I got a variety of responses. Lucy, who's in Ideate, left a funny comment. Jesse, a good friend from back home, expressed his confusion in my method. Hayden, one of my best friends, supported my picture. Velisa, one of my best friends at CMU, showed her agreement towards my caption. All that commented already knew about what I was trying to convey.

More interesting was who liked my profile picture. I only got 9 likes, compared to 23 on my last picture.

Of the 9 people who liked the profile picture, I would say that 6 are good friends I talk to on a regular basis, and 3 were in my target demographic. All of the people who liked the picture and weren't close friends with me were female. 

Some of my close friends that usually like my profile picture didn't, but that may be explained by the fact that they don't go on social media that often or had a busy weekend. However, I still expected more people to like my picture. 

Reflection:

I was surprised at how few people liked my profile picture, as I thought something this out of the box would get more attention. On the other hand, some of my friends asked me why I changed my profile picture or if it was for Ideate, compared to noone usually talking to me about my profile picture changing. 

Most memorably I had an in-depth discussion (argument) with one of my close friends, who didn't react to it on Facebook, but wanted to convey his belief that some anime girls are in fact cuter than real life girls. After this, I realized that even if people don't indicate that they saw something on social media on the platform, it doesn't mean that they aren't thinking about it. 

Interestingly, after I changed my picture back to a normal profile picture (shown next to my name), I got more likes on it in 15 minutes than the picture I used for this project did in 2 days. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that by being a picture of me, it was easier for people to recognize it as a profile picture and stop and like it. The second is that when they are confused, they may not know how to respond.  When people are confused by a profile picture I found that they are less likely to show a response, although due to the fact the people who didn't respond to it on social media reached out and talked to me about it in real life, I believe they'll think about it more than a normal profile picture.