A photo is worth a thousand words...

What I find most interesting about social networking sites is not the way in which we use them to communicate in a physical sense but rather how we use them to edit our lives, deciding how we are portrayed. This seems to have two different results, we either hold back our true selves, creating the person we would like to be. This may be driven from a lack of confidence, either from not fulfilling who we would like to be in real life or believing that our true character is not interesting enough. Or we use this as an extension of our true lives, expressing perhaps more in depth thoughts, gaining confidence from the lack of true human contact.
    
This editing also shows in the images we allow people to see, take Facebook for instance, we decide which photo we set as our profile picture, we upload the photos that we want people to see and we untag the photos that we don’t want to be associated with. I have to admit that I am guilty of this behaviour, as soon as I see that I have been tagged in a photo album I view the photos and untag any that I don’t like. This is either because I don’t like the way I look or the perception that I feel people may get of me. After all a photo is worth a thousand words.
    
It is this area of social network sites that I would like to begin to explore. I understand that this is drifting slightly away from my statement but I think that this ‘editing’ holds certain aspects of my original idea of communication, where we decide what is to be communicated whether through words or images.I like the idea of working with imagery, it excites me more than my previous ideas which had me working largely with text alone.
    
How do I set about creating work based on this idea? To begin I could take photographs from Facebook, taking someone’s profile picture and a photo that they have previously untagged. By untagging this photograph they have made a subtle change, and I feel that my work with the untagged photo must also be subtle, almost like leaving a trace behind, being masked over by the chosen profile picture. I wonder whether I could layer both photographs in a way in which when light was shined from behind, the second image would begin to show through? I also like the idea of combining image and text or continuing to use text alone, each time using contrasting elements. For example I could take an image and a statement from the same persons profile, or take a block of text and mark out another statement within the text. I feel there would need to be some kind of difference/contrast between what is being shown and what is being hidden. This contrast could be mirrored in the way I present the elements, take the block of text, these words could be created with a matt finish, then for the statement I wish to pick out I could add a subtle shine to the surface. There’s also the option of using a glow in the dark/UV paint, meaning that the hidden element will only show up at certain times, much like an untagged photo or a comment once written. They are still there, just not so current that they will be found easily.