The internet is feeling nostalgic. The latest Facebook trend is to post up your first ever “profile pic”. Oh, how we laugh at the heady days when we were inexperienced in digital profiling. How little we knew back in 2004 when the platform was launched.
Even before we start worrying about the NSA, CIA or spamming Nigerian generals promising transfers of $30 million using our personal data, there are more serious matters to attend to: what profile pic should I use for myself, and is there any responsibility to provide an accurate image? After all, who we are is defined by the tiny avatars on Twitter and Instagram and the glorious headshots on Facebook, LinkedIn and other networking sites.
I’ve been asked to speak at a conference, and as part of my bio they sent me an image taken nearly six years ago. It’s a cute picture, a rose-tinted look at a time that I remember as being carefree and quirky. It’s from my slimmer, more youthful days, when I hadn’t been through pregnancy and getting a full night’s sleep did not give me cause to write an excitable status update on Facebook. Was this picture OK, they asked?
It definitely looks like me, just less wrinkled, less podgy and of course much younger. So there’s no chance of mistaken identity. But would this be misrepresentation?
In the digital era our past life is as current and up front as our present, and I feel a responsibility to update my digital life to match my reality. But perhaps I’m being more honest than necessary.
Such existential questions of morality are a worry for us non-Millennials who are comfortable with the digital era, but for whom identities aren’t seamless across the online and offline worlds. If I was very digitally savvy, the right thing would be to just pick the latest photo of myself off Instagram.
Profile pics are important: from how you’re perceived at work, to establishing your “brand”, to who will date you.
A long-standing issue of the dishonest profile pic is how many dates and even arranged marriage proposals fell apart because the prospective candidate didn’t look like the picture on the bio data, a photo taken in long gone, better days.
When it comes to work and careers, portraying the right image is connected to ensuring you represent yourself in a truthful way. No need for warts and all, but it’s worth giving it a go to look like who you are. I don’t need to be somebody else, even if that someone is me in times past.
The danger of the digital world is that it is easy to allow the permanent existence of what we post to make us static creatures.
The passage of time is hidden away in the small text of dates of publication so that the experiences we post about whether on social or professional sites makes us feel more rounded, but does not allow us a sense of forward progression and impetus.
The updating of our images can act as a symbol of our changing world views, opinions and experience.
In the end I sent an updated picture. That’s who I am today: older, more experienced and attempting to move forward.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk
