Written by John Feigelson
Facebook is a place to connect with people. Those people may be your friends from high school, your friends from camp, or that one cousin who you haven’t seen in a few years. These groups, though, are by no means all-encompassing. During a student’s time at Colorado College, especially in this day and age, the largest group they tend to interact with on Facebook is their peers.
Students have developed an abnormal social system online—a ‘like’ can have any number of different meanings, and friend requests are full of subtext. This is because people have developed their own language of virtual social cues. While not unique to this campus, this social language is due to the mix of human anxieties and technology. This social system is of little benefit, and the more honest we are in our virtual interactions, the more value we will feel in our real-life social circles.
What makes a good profile picture? Profile pictures are meant to provide an accurate first impression, or simply a way to showcase yourself when you’re at your best. Observing the multitudes of profile pictures present within my own college Facebook friends, most every photo is objectively ‘cool.’ These Facebook friends are pictured in beautiful locations, dressed well, or looking attractive. Sometimes it is just one of the above descriptors, sometimes a combination.
CC students are notorious for their engagement with outdoor recreation, and a number of profile pictures support this, including my own. I have to acknowledge bias here, as my own Facebook friends from CC are not necessarily indicative of the larger student population online. Even when exploring the profiles of the wider campus community, it becomes clear that profile pictures fall into at least one of these categories: fun, outdoorsy, or representative. Perhaps it is a fun picture of you at Llamapalooza, representative of your love of music and being in the sun. Maybe it is a representative picture of you and your family; maybe it is a fun picture of you pursuing your favorite outdoor activity.
Regardless of which category your picture falls into, profile pictures are all geared towards constructing an image of yourself. The profile picture is the first thing people see of your digital life—there is reason for it to be meticulously selected. As such, it may as well be something representative of your identity, but it is unnecessary to have a profile picture that projects an image not representative of the user.
After the profile picture has been put up on your page, no doubt people will see your profile and wonder whether or not they should click the ‘Add Friend’ button. No doubt some of those reading this have looked at someone’s profile, and agonized over whether or not they should send a friend request. An easy place to start is whether or not you know the potential friend. It is mystifying to me as to why someone would send a request without knowing, or at least having met, a person once or twice before sending a friend request.
Feel free to send that friend request if you have met somebody, gone on a block break with them, or been in a class with them. Social media is not a replacement for real-life interaction; it is simply a way in which the latter can be augmented. It is all well and good to have crushes on people from afar, whether they are social or romantic. The best rule is this: if you have talked to them and exchanged names, feel free to send that request.
When the pictures have been posted, and the friend requests accepted, there is another conundrum. Should you like their photos? Clicking the little blue thumbs-up button could have any number of different meanings. The most basic, of course, is simply that you like whatever that individual is putting out there on the web. You might be romantically interested, you might be trying to reconnect with an old friend in a subtle way; these subliminal messages, whatever their intent, are often worthless.
It is impossible to guarantee that a ‘like’ will be interpreted as you want it to be, unless you send somebody a message explaining the desired interpretation. Keep it simple and express that you like a photo by clicking the ‘like’ button. As for the new Facebook ‘reactions,’ I propose the exact same thing. Express that you love a photo by ‘reacting’ with a heart, express anger or sadness in the same way.
It is easy to be swept up in the complexities of social media. These codes of behavior online do little but compound social anxieties by making social interaction, both virtual and physical, more complicated than it needs to be. Social anxieties are very real, having experienced them myself, and by being honest in our social interactions there is a measure of mental peace achieved. Social systems are undoubtedly intricate, but in keeping our own methods of living in those social systems both simple and honest, we will go a long way towards soothing our own real-life social questions.