The dangers of ‘profile picture’ as presentation of self

What does your profile picture say about us?

In his work, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze,” Psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan appropriates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological model of vision that identifies a fundamental “reversibility” in the way human beings see the world. Lacan adopts Merleau-Ponty’s theory that the human body is both subject and object, the “seeing” and the “seen.” Taking this notion of reversibility a step further, Lacan insists that, despite the reversibility of the seeing and the seen, the possibility of “being seen” is always primary. As humans, according to Lacan, we exist in relation to an internalized or imagined “gaze” of an “Other” (74). In many ways, social media can be understood as Lacan’s notion of the “Other.”The technology of social media allows for the construction of a digital “Other” which is internalized and is changing the way we see the world.

Our social world is increasingly becoming digitized and mediated through our computers, smartphones and personal devices. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2015, 62% of the adult population United States is on Facebook. 24% of the United States adult population is on Instagram. 70% of Facebook users use the platform daily, and 60% of Instagram users check their profile at least once a day, up 10 points from 2014. Furthermore, according to Pew, over two-thirds of Americans are smartphone owners, allowing constant access to social media platforms. These numbers are expected to increase in 2016. This cultural obsession with social media is changing the way we see the world. It’s changing the way we see each other, and it’s changing the way we see ourselves.

Bernie Hogan (2010), a social network analyst with Oxford University, argues that self-presentation can be split into “performances” and “exhibitions.” According to Hogan, “performances” take place in “synchronous situations” between the presenter and the viewer, while exhibitions depend on “artifacts,” which take place in “asynchronous” displays. Exhibitions include status updates and photos that require contributions from a third party “curator.” Hogan compares social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to curators, in that we trust them first with our information, which they then distribute to our social networks. In this way, the technology of social media allows individuals to consume and view each other’s past “artifacts” without directly engaging the individual, or in many instances, even letting the profile owner know that his or her information is being viewed.

The importance of online profiles in our notion of self-presentation makes this a time when the visual begins to take prominence over the real. Instead of experiencing our lives from our own points of view, we view the world from the perspective of how others will view and respond to our vantage points. Because we are each responsible for creating our own media, we are always visible and therefore, always “seen.” Invisibly determining the way we relate to ourselves and establish our worth is the “gaze,” so omnipresent we often forget that it’s even there. Lacan’s notion of the gaze of the “Other” is more internalized than ever because of our focus on how we are perceived through the images we deliver.

The idea that the gaze of social media has become internalized is troubling when we consider that, as life becomes more connected to the digital, so does a sense of social identity and self-worth. Establishing value on social media means collecting more followers, shares, and likes. This means that we often bolster our profiles with images that we feel people will like to see, and evaluate ourselves based on how our images are received. In order to participate in social media, we are constantly curating and marketing ourselves to fit the expectations of the gaze.

And what does our cultural value, visually?

In her classic essay, “The Visual Pleasures of Narrative Cinema,” film theorist Laura Mulvey examines Freudian ideas of scopophilia, or the pleasure in looking. As Mulvey argues, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” Mulvey derives the term, the “male gaze,” to describe the way in which the male “projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.” As Mulvey points out, the “female character simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.” In short, the woman is given meaning according to how the male views her; she is a spectacle for both the male character and male viewer, with little agency of her own.

Mulvey was writing in the 1970s about classical narrative cinema. This was well before the rise of social media, but her idea of the “male gaze” is still pertinent today and perhaps even more so as we move further into the digital age. Because our culture is so indoctrinated in the male gaze, we respond most favorably to those who operate within it. The accounts with the most followers on Instagram and Facebook are women who have modified their bodies and faces, and who only post photos of themselves, their various body parts, and their friends who look eerily similar. It’s not only men who are devoted followers, but also women, too, who look up to them as an ideal.

If we couple Hogan’s theory of presentation of self in the digital age with Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze, we reveal a critical problem with the impact social media has on our social identities. The idea that we trust our “artifacts” of self to be curated by platforms that cater to the male gaze is particularly problematic because our fetishization with what we “see” online affects the way we present our own profiles. As both men and women work to “fit in” and cater to the male gaze, we enter a state of groupthink, and everyone begins to “look” the same. The more our lives move away from the real and into the digital, the more we subject ourselves to the gaze of the digital “Other.” Our social lives become digitized and the gaze becomes a controlling force distributed  into our pockets and onto our bodies. We have all been “othered.”

The problems inherent in the gaze are not mechanical. They are cultural.  At a certain point we need to push back. If we—men and women alike—are to continue to subject ourselves to the “gaze” by posting to social media, we need to push back. We need to poke holes in the group think, and this begins by recognizing that there is a problem. The next time you update your online profile, or like one of your friend’s pictures, be sure to ask yourself not only what it says about you but also what it says about us.