Ok, yes, I admit, the “requests to be friends” I received were strictly males' ones, persons whom I do not know in my “real life” and Ok, yes, I doubted for more than a couple of days… “Should I accept them or not”? Then, I decided to go through my friend’s list, to see if they were my friends' friends. Being that too hard a task, I told myself: it is always like this in friendship, whether you open up to strangers or whether you’ll always have the same friends.

Anyway, another former experience had already taught me that if you erase a FB friend from your list the other person receives no notification such as “Gaby has removed me from her friends list”. Probably it's like that in "real life", no one notifies you either. So in the case they’d got too naughty I could always delete them, with not much of wrongdoing.

But, how can a simple image attract other people’s attention and draw their interest towards it? In this specific case, I guess that maybe it is simply because not many people post pictures where the person’s flesh is readily visible, palpable.

It was really weird to check out what “a” photo can or cannot do... & still does...

Every portrait is, in a certain way, an auto portrait because it reflects the beholder’s way of seeing and commenting on it. What would happen if one had to show on the World Wide Web only one photo of him or herself as a self portrait? Which one would they chose? One asks him/herself in silence: who am I? I believe this question underlies my little personal experience.

On both FB and Flickr we can give our opinion on other’s photographs, setting up like this a dialog. In each of these platforms there are some differences between how comments are posted. Here, comments were done through FB in a one-to-one email method, privately, and the rest of my friends could not see them. Currently, I have posted the same photo in Flickr, to see what happens, but for the moment it has not had comments. Probably, it is because in Flickr comments are, unless the photo is posted as private, always public.

“But if every portrait is a mirror, an open mirror, those of us who look at it, we are then a mirror of that portrait, to which we give sense and sensibility… Intimate relationships configurate new identities, where the portrayed, the artist and the viewer, can suddenly be the same person[1].” “If man still wants to see his reflection, if he still wants to admire the grandeur of his mind, he must then take a look in the mirror of the world.” says Joseph de Chesnes[2].

A virtual book with all the faces …is that Facebook? In the last two years much has been said about FB. In my case, I’ve just shared with you what happened. Research should also be fun and learning and understanding how the social web works can also be done through experience.

What will happen next no one knows. It is a work in progress and definitely meant to be continued... so, please be my guest and make a comment...

Notes

[1] Alberto Manguel, Leer imágenes: una historia privada del arte (Reading Images, translated from English by Carlos José Restrepo), Madrid, Spain, Alianza Editorial, 2002, p. 217.

[2] Joseph de Chesnes, "Miroir du Monde", 1587, quoted, op. cit., p. 211.