Why Change: Toward Understanding Facebook Users' Profile Picture Changing and Management Behavior

• Main Authors: Huang, Min-E, 黃敏娥
• Other Authors: Wang, Hao-Chuan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/47cp9h

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 資訊系統與應用研究所 === 105 === Social network sites like Facebook have become a venue for people to network with one another and present themselves in the ways they want. While profile pictures are arguably one important channel for people to manage their online images, there is limited understanding on why and how people decide to change or maintain their profile pictures. The current designs of social network sites also only provide low-level functions like image uploading for profile picture management, lacking more advanced support for meeting people needs. In this work, we presented a survey study and interviews to investigate Facebook users’ profile picture changing behavior qualitatively. The result revealed a number of key driving motivations for people to change and choose profile pictures, including showing one’s desired self-image, recording personal life document, updating individual’s current appearance in consistency with how they currently look like in the real world, and to raise people’s awareness of one’s status and presence. Social network users have acknowledged of the importance of profile picture in term of impression management on online society and relationship maintenance with people in offline environment. Therefore, some users regularly reviewed and managed previous profile photos to support positive image construction. The findings inform the designs of functions to support profile picture management needs.