I’m seeing more and more people sharing “photos” which are simply quotes in a bitmap. Some of them have a photo or image which provides context, or a picture of the person it is attributed to, but more of the time it is just text in a square. It’s basically the facebook equivalent of a bumper sticker.
Is this a recent thing? Where are these coming from, and who makes these? Why not just copy and paste something into the status?
I feel like it is time for some kind of parody, equivalent to the ones that ridicule the “make this your status” slacktivist posts
Because humans are visual creatures, and the graphic treatment makes the words stand out and memorable. It’s a way to get the point across quickly and effectively – it rises above the noise of your text-based newsfeed. Test it yourself… when scanning your feed, do you notice the tiny text of status updates first? Or the pretty pictures?
I’ve ended up “unsubscribing” from several people on facebook because of this crap. One here or there is fine and easy to ignore, but a couple of friends posted 20 or 30 of these in a row multiple times. It was insane. These are friends that I normally enjoy reading their updates for the most part, but it was like they couldn’t stop hitting that “share” link.
“Oh everyone I know will get a chuckle out of this…and this, and this, and this, and this…”
The people I know who do it are much younger and less prone to rationalize it like that. They just think it’s cool. (My 13-year old does it, for instance, and my older daughter did it when she was a teenager as well.)
My guess is that many of those began on reddit.com. Members there get ‘karma’ (useless bragging points) when people upvote your links - but you don’t get any karma for ‘self-posts’ (posts that are just text without a link to an external site). So people there tend to do this, make up photos with the quote on it rather than just typing out the quote itself, so they still get silly the karma points. Reddit has really gained an incredible amount of popularity over the past year or so, and I’m seeing many things from there start to pop up on Facebook.
A lot of my friends do this and most of the time they are the result of a “Share” from a Facebook account they are subscribed to that post nothing but funny pictures.
Here’s one someone linked from yesterday Neurotic Humor.
So basically these friends get these graphics posted on their feed from these other accounts and when they see one that’s particularly LOL-worthy they click “Share” and post it to their wall and it ends up in your feed. Yay.
I imagine most adults don’t rationalize it either. Humans just respond to visual stimulation. A large part of our behavior isn’t rational (or even consciously thought out).
Hell, I just read a news article about a study done on what we perceive as “cool” dance moves. I’m pretty sure the subjects of the test weren’t critically analyzing the dance moves or rationalizing why X was sexy and Y was not, but the researchers could determine specific body motions that were well-received, and specific ones that were not. This doesn’t mean that people go clubbing with specific mental checklists of the dancing they’ll find sexy.
And they are so very helpful when Facebook tells you that they are having problems verifying your identity, and would you mind matching 3 random “photos” with the names of three friends.
That’s kinda Facebook’s fault, not having a way to say that a photo is not actually you.
BTW, I think there’s something else behind using a graphic as your profile pic: there’s no trace. As much as Zuckerberg says that the tendency is towards increased sharing, I’m definitely seeing the exact opposite, with most Facebook profiles completely locked down and people actually scolding others for sharing things on Facebook that they shouldn’t.
I’ve been noticing this trend lately too. I have far fewer personal posts on my FB page nowadays – either people don’t post very often like myself, or if they do, it’s via a photo, a quote as poster, or a link to such-and-such an article.
There’s also the Pinterest craze. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you share whatever strikes your fancy. The one thing I don’t like about it is that, if you’re on FB, it’ll gank your information from there without asking you.