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Friending the Virgin: Some Thoughts on the Prehistory of Facebook

August 8, 2011 Comments off

Friending the Virgin: Some Thoughts on the Prehistory of Facebook
Source: SAGE Publications (SAGE Open)

This article looks at how previous practice of portraiture prepared the way for self-presentation on social networking sites. A portrait is not simply an exercise in the skillful or “realistic” depiction of a subject. Rather, it is a rhetorical exercise in visual description and persuasion and a site of intricate communicative processes. A long evolution of visual culture, intimately intertwined with evolving notions of identity and society, was necessary to create the conditions for the particular forms of self-representation we encounter on Facebook. Many of these premodern strategies prefigure ones we encounter on Facebook. By delineating the ways current practices reflect earlier ones, we can set a baseline from which we can isolate the precise novelty of current practice in social networking sites.

Categories: art, SAGE Publications, social and cultural issues, social media
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