The impersonal album: chronicling life in the digital age.

The aggregate album is still in the fetal stages of its development. Its future direction will depend on the increasing popularity of Facebook and other hybrid dot-coms that combine the promotion of individual user identities (social networking sites, dating services, personal Web pages, etc.) with photo-sharing portals. But the early signs are encouraging that, from this strange offspring of a nineteenth-century model of friendship and twenty-first-century technology, an entirely novel form of "portrait-chronicle" is emerging: one that promises to define the individual in a different way, impartially, through the collective eyes of the community.

J. MACNEILL MILLER is a freelance writer living in New York City. You can read more of his writing on visual culture at www.page291.com/blog.

NOTES 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, o. 69 (July 1863), 8. 2. As Facebook has opened its site to customizable additions from external developers, the strict aesthetics of the site may be vulnerable to change, depending on user preference. Some of the new "applications" being offered by third-party developers include maps of personal travels, areas for communal drawing, and music playlists. It is too early to tell how large of an impact these changes will have on Facebook's overall look and focus, but as of this writing they remain minimal. Interestingly, the carte de visite album saw similar experiments in novelties and gimmicks once it became an established household curio. Some manufacturers marketed albums that contained such novel additions as clocks and even built-in music boxes. 3. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 8.