Stalking the Facebook Profiles of the 17th Century

Social networking thinkers, particularly social networking detractors, like to talk about the broadcasting of one's self to an audience of strangers as if it’s a radically new thing. It feels like a new, unprecedented phenomenon, and it’s important to locate it within the disjunctive growth of the Internet. Take the topic of self-presentation, and the notion that living online means the loss of one’s real identity to one’s fabricated identity: the deeper we get into online self-presentation, the more we become that presentation and less the person that we “really” are.

What if it's not so weird? Maybe broadcasting an identity is an old urge. A recent-ish paper out in the Sage OPEN journal makes an argument that the Facebook profiles of now aren't all that different than the portraits of Rembrandt in the 1600s. "[Social network sites] s are contemporary versions of portraits," writes Stanford’s Larry Friedlander, the paper’s author. The idea's kinda interesting. Portraits were more than just a visual likeness, but a whole big package of identity.

Although a Velasquez portrait does not look much like a Facebook page, it fulfills many of the same functions. A portrait by Velasquez, hanging in the grand palace of Madrid, articulates an image of royal power and privilege to those permitted to view it, and thus reinforces the sitter's right to certain prerogatives and respects.

As for the whole "social network" side of things – that your profile is what it is because it's connected to other profiles – and maybe portraits aren't terrible good at having online buds, Friedlander even has an answer to that:

If we turn back to our Facebook example, we can see a feature that seems truly novel: its ability to present a self embedded in a web of interconnections. So the Facebook page shown above can be represented, using an app, as circles of connections tracing all the ways "friends" of the site are related to each other. But this feature is already part of the repertoire of traditional portraits. The great painting "Las Meninas" of Velasquez portrays the Royal Princess as a node in a complex and dynamically changing web of relationships (Figure 5) . . . we can see how, although restricted to oil on canvas, the artist has managed to alert us to the shifting connections between the people who surround and give meaning to the Princess.

You could say this is all kinda dumb because we're comparing fine art to technology, but 17th century portraiture had its own tech boundaries. Painting is a technology, after all. I think it's maybe just as interesting to reverse the comparison and look not at art as social networking, but social networking as art. Like, consider the aesthetics of social networking.

By and large, I don't give a shit who the people are in Rembrandt's paintings. I'm concerned about the painting itself, how it looks and how it makes me feel. Now, apply that to a Facebook portrait. It doesn't work so well. Where the hell are the great Facebook artists of the 21th century? (These are pretty cool, but not quite what we’re looking for.)

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv, @everydayelk.