Valerie Simon
While I have always been a big believer in transparency in social media, a recent experience gave me reason to reconsider.
I had been tweeting with @Journalistics for a while. Rather than a photo, @journalistics has a cool “J” logo. We had been exchanging numerous ideas and at some point, even began sharing our challenges balancing work and life. I have a toddler and an infant and when I learned that @journalistics has an infant, toddler, and a four year old, and still finds time to blog. I felt an immediate kinship… @journalistics was intelligent, busy and thoughtful… the type of mom I aspired to be!
Then @journalistics sent me a Facebook invite. With his picture. Yes, his picture! As I looked back on his tweets, I realized that any of his comments could have been made by my husband, or several of the men I work with at BurrellesLuce; caring, involved fathers who work hard to balance parenting and a career. But without a picture, I had made an assumption that he was a mom, and was happily tweeting a way with my new “girlfriend.”
Without a “face” I had unintentionally, created a persona. What if we had not begun attaching photographs to our virtual profiles? Could we have created a universe where we might all communicate without any bias? No gender issues, ageism or other disruptive stereotypes to block the free flow of ideas? Would our messages be received differently if they came through in their purest form?
Social media provides us with a new universe in which we can exchange information and while I fully subscribe to the theory of authenticity, I can’t help but wonder if we would all hear a little more, if we saw a little less.
Do you think that using a photo is a useful part a social media profile or does it simply distract from the message?
