Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

My Facebook profile image has become a digital canvas of sorts. My profile pictures are almost always doctored in photoshop. At times it’s just a traditional self portrait. In some instances I created a digital montage instead of the traditional self portrait.

Cindy Sherman and Lucas Samaras come to mind while looking at these portraits. They both utilized their own visage in their work. Cindy’s work was more of a cultural critique concerning women’s role in society and Lucas was more of an introspective artist, looking inside himself to explain existence in a sense.

I have a history of drawing and painting portraiture so this comes naturally to me. Below is a selected few of my ‘Facebook Profile Portraits’.

I like to use Facebook. I’ve used it as my blog for the past 2 years or so. I’ve also used it to reconnect with long lost friends and world scattered family members.

Facebook has a unique advertisement feature that supposedly allows the end-user to sort of control the advertisement and what kind of products they are targeted. It’s simple really and it’s the same model as Pandora.com where beneath each advertisement there is a thumbs up/thumbs down icon.

They’ve changed it a bit to a thumbs up and an X instead of the thumbs down. Once you click the ‘I Don’t like’ icon (The X on the right corner) a pop up window appears with more choices to select from. These choices are intended to instruct the advertiser as to why you disliked the advertisement and instruct the advertisement database to stop targeting you with this particular product.

The thumbs up simply tells the facebook advertising algorithm to continue targeting your pages with similar advertisements. These adverts are sometimes triggered by keywords on your page. According to facebook;

Facebook has other great ways to target a specific market group that uses data-mining like location based ads and age based ads (350 million to choose from).

Like Pandora, I use these features almost religiously to fine tune the ads that appear on my page and other pages I visit. I’ve found an amazing thesis editing service and some interesting services via facebook advertisements. I’ve also become annoyed at times at ads that I am clearly not interested in and not sure why they keep on appearing on my page(s).

As you could see, with each advertisement I clicked on the X (I don’t like button) and chose repetitive as my reason. I’ve been doing this for almost 10 months. Choosing the I Don’t Like feature on these police, swat teams, and work for the NSA advertisements. Facebook’s advertisement algorithm keeps on targeting my page(s) with these repetitive and uninteresting advertisements to work for the ‘man’…;-)

Is there something wrong with Facebook’s like and don’t like functions concerning their advertisements? They worked in the past and now they don’t seem to work as well. These police, SWAT teams, and NSA advertisements are getting really annoying and I want them to stop now!

Why was I targeted these adverts to begin with? There is nothing in my profile that could be used as a keyword to trigger them nor did I click the ‘I like’ thumbs up button to instruct the algorithm to give me more. If it’s simply the age targeting factor, then I took care of that by clicking on the thumbs down icon probably more then 100 times!!!

Facebook, please fix this problem ASAP. I know, you have 350+ million users to cater for…:-)

Social networking sites have become an important tool in marketing your business, gaining an audience, and translating that audience into clients. Part of these business pages, whether they are on Facebook or other sites, have avatars/profile pics. It’s the first thing that the end-user sees. These avatars are usually neglected and not catchy or conceptual. More often then not they are the business’s logo or a stock image that is thrown in there with no connection what so ever to the product. These avatars need more attention!

I believe that businesses should start devoting time and energy in designing thoughtful and aesthetic avatars for their Facebook pages, and ALL OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES that they are involved with. These so called avatars should become an integral part of any identity/branding system. The corporations’ style guides should contain specs for each social networking sites avatars.

As a designer, the first thing that I look at is what I like to call the ‘canvas area’. The space that the given social networking site allocates to each user to display their profile pics/avatars. After finding out the maximum dimensions, create something that suits your business conceptually/aesthetically and that ALSO fits in with the surrounding area; the site itself or in Fine Arts terminology - the background.

A good example of that is my VIMEO avatar. I used a background color that I copied from VIMEO. I also made my avatar snug, it fits aesthetically with the entire page (rounded corners on the top and sharp corners on the bottom) as well as my current mini-branding campaign.

Do not neglect those avatars because whether we like it or not, first impressions do matter especially when the competition is everywhere.

Monday, November 16th, 2009 @ precisely 12:00AM I tried to log into facebook. I entered Facebook.com into my browser’s URL field and clicked submit. Oddly enough, the browser proceeded to redirect me to Myspace. I refreshed a number of times and it further redirected me to a Myspace profile page of a 16 year old named Samuel Garcia. Were my eyes deceiving? I tested Facebook on my only other internet browser, my cell phone. Same thing, the URL automatically got rerouted to Garcia’s Myspace page.

I thought that facebook got hacked. It only lasted for 5-6 minutes. I posted about it elsewhere to see what peeps had to say. A friend of mine that works in the field and that is familiar with this sort of thing had this to say:

Whatever really happened was odd and only lasted briefly. If that kid, if he’s really a kid, hacked into my ISP or Facebook then K U D O S to him…:-)