They made it! On October 4, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced that the site now boasts more than a billion members “liking,” “posting,” “commenting,” and “poking.” In 2007, there were 100,000 Facebook users in France. Today, there are more than 25 million. This exponential rise shows how Facebook has become a part of our daily lives. Now, someone without a Facebook account is like an outcast. It can even seem suspicious.
Before we begin to examine photography on Facebook, a little background.
On Facebook, you have a lot of friends, more friends than you have in real life: former colleagues, the hottest girl from your high school (to whom, you’re pleased to discover, the years have not been kind), an aunt you haven’t talked to in years. The list of friends is the primary navigation tool on Facebook. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram developed the “small world” theory (sometimes referred to as “six degrees of separation”), which demonstrated how each person is separated from anyone else by a maximum of five intermediate relations. That means that Barack Obama is fewer than five people removed from me. With social networks, Barack is only 3.74 people removed.
The image you present of yourself on Facebook is strategic. The content we share on Facebook, including photographs, gradually builds up an identity chosen by us. We’re like the curator of our own museum, selecting and arranging the parts of our lives to deliver a message to our viewers, who can comment on the result and give us their approval by “liking” what they see.
Pauline Auzou
Read the full text of this article on the French version of Le Journal.
