The impersonal album: chronicling life in the digital age.

To some degree, all social networking portals offer this kind of experience. Facebook sets itself apart in two important ways: first, it has a direct genealogical relationship to older forms of social networking; second, it has been developed aesthetically in a manner that reflects that history. A quick comparison between Facebook and its rivals demonstrates its unique heritage. Take, for example, its most well-known competitor, MySpace, which originated as a virtual hangout for musicians and maintains a multimedia feel. The average MySpace page is chaotic, dotted with animations and commentary and overlayed with music. Pages representing corporations and political campaigns rub elbows with individual users in a largely unpoliced virtual free-for-all.

By comparison, user pages on Facebook look spartan. Each one consists of a single image surrounded by personal information in the form of text against a clean white background. Other users' comments, and any links, are relegated to smaller spaces at the bottom of the page. In the carte de visite tradition, the site is built around singular, iconic images. (2)

Facebook also reflects tradition in its preservation of exclusivity. While the site now allows anyone to join, users can carefully customize privacy settings, and most pages are only visible to fellow members of local, school, or work-related networks. In contrast, MySpace and Friendster allow anyone surfing the Internet substantial access to member profiles, even if visitors are not registered with the sites. Facebook began at Harvard University, and it maintains a more cliqueish, clubby feel.

While the basic structure of Facebook has a distinguished, if musty, pedigree, it employs twenty-first century technologies to break new ground in vernacular photography. Every user page functions as a modern day analogue of the carte de visite, but the network also allows users to upload personal photograph albums--"My Summer Vacation," "Graduation," etc.--onto their pages, layering modern functionality on top of the nineteenth-century paradigm. The site's commitment to photography is reflected here by its infrastructure, which allows users to upload and link an unlimited number of photograph albums to their personal pages. This primarily visual focus has paid off: according to Facebook's statistics, it is now the most popular photo-sharing site in the United States, with almost two billion user photos uploaded to its servers.

In themselves, user albums are nothing special. They are simple collections of photographs, generated by individual amateurs seeking to document their lives and play with the photographic medium. Pictures of friends and family are interspersed with the occasional landscape or sunset. However, Facebook is unusual among networking sites in that it provides an easily navigable interface that permits users to "tag" pictures they view and jump from tag to tag. (Photo "tagging" is the ability to label pictures by subject matter.) In theory, identical tags--"New Orleans," for instance, or "dog"--employed by multiple end-users create a sort of super album, an amalgamation of pictures by multiple authors with the same subject matter.

Tagging is not an uncommon feature on photo sites or the Internet at large. But within the matrix of an image-oriented social networking service like Facebook, it completely reshapes the way that photographic identity is created and viewed by others. It is a truism of photographic criticism to note that albums tell the viewer more about who the creator wants to be and chooses to remember than who the creator actually is. The individuals and families who construct albums prefer to focus on happy times and memorable events that mark transitions as they struggle to build what Susan Sontag called a family's "portrait-chronicle of itself." (3) The result is often flat and one-sided. Family slideshows and album viewings are notorious for the fascination they inspire in the compiler and the boredom they generate in most spectators.

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Tagging tosses out the old system. True, users can still create albums as they please, and the albums may still suffer from the bloat of excessive imagery. But these albums have lost ground as the standard for an individual's photographic identity. Ask any Facebook user--if you want to get a visual impression of someone's life from Facebook, you do not look at the user's albums. Instead, you click on a link the site provides to the aggregate album of every picture tagged with the user's name. The aggregate provides a far more comprehensive overview of an individual's social circle and activities than any older album format.

What all this means is that the traditional album, which served as the standard of vernacular photographic identity for over one hundred years, now has a serious rival. Moreover, the competition--this as-yet-unnamed aggregate of photographs--represents a major departure from the basic theory underlying the album. Albums assert the authority of the maker. While their goal is to provide photographic documentation of a life, the end result is inevitably a form of self-expression as well, a manifestation of an individual organizing will or authority. At the end of the day, a traditional album is a form of wish fulfillment, one person's attempt to express his or her desired relationship to the surrounding world.

Insofar as it depends upon the gift of others' photographic tokens of affection, the carte de visite album (or a user's personalized Facebook network) represents a position closer to communal authority. The aggregate album strips the individual of authority entirely It is the composite portrait of an individual created by the community, an emergent property of the system made possible by the sheer volume of photographs created today. As a by-product of its incidental nature--none of the photographers shooting these pictures aim to provide a comprehensive picture of their subjects' lives--the aggregate album offers a kind of objectivity that the albums of the past could not. Finally, the immateriality of digital technology precludes any authorial organization to these tagged pictures: since they can be viewed as expandable thumbnails that do not have to be flipped through, any attempt at sequencing is futile. In contrast to the strictly guided tour of the traditional album, Facebook allows viewers to navigate within and between albums as their own interest dictates.

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Naturally, individuals still get an opportunity for self-presentation. The signature photograph that appears next to a user's biographical information--the image analogous to the portrait on the carte de visite--is entirely determined by the user. Any attempt to characterize the kinds of portraits chosen by users on Facebook quickly reveals its own fruitlessness. The only theme that unites the varied forms of presentation from page to page is a decided lack of adherence to any single convention. Some of this freedom is the product of digital technology. With tiny, sensitive digital cameras that offer numerous post-production options, amateurs can afford to play fast and loose with their self-images. They may be in black and white or in color. They are shot from all angles. Subjects appear in all styles of dress, from casual to formal wear. Conventions do not really exist.

At a more basic level, though, there are underlying similarities between these pictures. Most users select snapshots of themselves taken by friends and family, or even self-portraits. Studio shots rarely make an appearance. Perhaps as a consequence of the demise of the studio and the democratization of picture taking, a new form of iconic portrait appears in a number of these pictures: the cropped self. Social norms dictate that most snapshots be taken with friends, relatives, and teammates, so amateur photographers have a difficult time finding pictures of themselves alone. In order to create a personal portrait, they visually wrench themselves from their social contexts, cropping tightly to eliminate other people. These incisions are not always clean, and the results often look like photographs from Nikki S. Lee's 2005 "Parts" series, featuring stray arms, cheeks, and noses intruding into the supposedly personal frame.

These severed self-portraits serve as a neat visual symbol of the larger implications of tagging for vernacular photography. The "self," they seem to say, is best understood as a piece of a larger social network, not as an autonomous essence. Likewise, the best visual record of the self is not the album's carefully constructed presentation of an individual, or even the individual's picture of his or her social network. Instead, the best documentation is a composite record, one created through countless interactions with other human beings. This new kind of record is a strange beast, but it reflects the spirit of the time. In the Internet age, the expert authority of the encyclopedia is being threatened by a collection of unpaid articles composed communally, and free online publications are bringing the outlets of traditional media to their knees. It is only natural that traditional photographic assertions of authority--in this case, the album--should come under fire as well.