Blakewell & Sontag-Facebook Pictures

Facebook immediately came to mind as I read Sontag’s essay on how photography is employed and also Blakewell’s theory of image acts. Over the past few years the photo application on Facebook has changed. At first you could only upload 60 pictures per album and it was a long and tedious process, now Facebook goes as far as recognizing faces in order to tag people in pictures and an unlimited amount of pictures can be uploaded. I look at some of my friends with over 200 albums and realize that they may be sharing too much and allowing Facebook pictures to represent their every day life. I feel that I am part of some of my friends’ lives not only by viewing their statuses but with the pictures that they constantly upload. Sontag discusses the idea about how photos become evidence in a manner that we upload them to this social networking website for our friends to see what we are doing. We have evidence in a sense of what vacation, party, or sports game we attended.

I also thought of Bakewell’s essay about image acts, as some photographs uploaded to Facebook are very powerful especially today with all of the users of social networking sites. “Images can flatter, promote, benefit, and better people, just as words can. They can also fight, accuse, denounce, and harm those same people” (Blakewell, 30). With the use of Facebook, we are not using verbal words to communicate to our friends but we are using images. Blakewell discusses how images can “reveal much about who we are: our class, gender, culture, age, personality, temperament, mood, and morals” (30). With all of this being on Facebook, through the images that users upload; Facebook users may be giving away too much information and employing photography in an inappropriate manner.