On the Face of Facebook: Historical Images and Personhood in Filipino Social Networking

Abstract

Exchanging and manipulating digital images on social networking sites offers people new ways to renegotiate a wide variety of relationships. This paper examines how interactions on Facebook transform personhood and norms for relationships and belongings among a particular group of Filipino users. By tracking historical images that index users' profiles, the argument charts the simultaneous modes in which digital photographs act in online social networks. These photographs are more than simply objects and instruments. Users' profile photographs also act as aspects of others and of the self—aspects mediated by reciprocal display, the content of the images and their histories of circulation.