Journalists spend a long time choosing or pursuing the very best pictures they can to communicate a story. The pose that an individual is captured in can make a big difference to their reputation and to how readers perceive them.
Given the prominence of Twitter, you’d think that people would think a bit harder about their profile pictures. If you tweet a lot, chances are your mug (or whatever reprehensible object you have chosen to illustrate your persona) will be beaming out onto screens around the world many times each day.
A check on those I’m following and others whose content I have tripped across in the past few weeks leads me to believe that there are actually just eight different kinds of pictures being used, not all of them to wholly positive effect:
1. The beaming grinner. Nothing wrong with this at all. Everyone loves a cheery smile. The only drawback is when conveying extremely serious or tragic information – a bit like a newscaster faux pas when smiling through a report on a motorway pile-up
2. The face of wisdom. It it a bird, is it a plane, is it someone looking like they’re old a really bad album cover? Try too hard to look wise and you may just end up looking like a tosser
3. The body part profiler. I’ve seen elbows, lips, knees. Not big, not clever really
4. The sexy pout. Not always appropriate. Looks a bit like HM The Queen might if she took to advertising bras. Can lead to audience discomfort
5. The inanimate object. ‘I’m too clever and thought-provoking to use a picture of me, so here’s a carrot’. Knobs
6. The shadowy type. Face partially obscured in arty photo attempt. Done crudely in Microsoft Paint. Mine is in this category; it’s time to change it
7. Smug bastard. Fat face too close to the lens, trying desperately to look like a social media overlord. The smug mug that looms forth from one of Twitter’s most prolific contributors, who uses the word trending far too often and is probably very poorly endowed, is slap bang at the epicentre of this category. Naming no names. But you know who I mean
8. The passport shot. Safe but oh-so-very-dull. Smile, it may never happen
Then there are people who change their profile picture so often that they probably fall into all of these categories. Or a separate one altogether, called Skittishly Indecisively Try-Hard.
