You know what I find really irritating? Is when people put a photo of their face in the upper left corner of their weblog, so that the whole time that I’m trying to look at their site, I have to cope with their beady little eyes boring into me.
Initially, I used to think it was just sort of a pompous thing to do to have your photo there. As if anybody gave a rat’s ass what you looked like. Just write, for godsakes. Spare me the self-aggrandizement. But I think I just figured out a better way to describe what makes me not like it when people do that.
There’s an excellent book by Scott McCloud, called Understanding Comics. And if you have any interest in art, writing, comics, or just good story-telling, I highly recommend it. Anyway, he talks about one of the techniques that comic book artists use to get people to identify with characters - especially in Japanese comics. The “hero” of the story, or the character who you identify with is drawn out in a slightly more simple style than the other characters (more cartoony). Characters who are enemies, or foreign to the main character, are drawn in with greater detail (more realistic).
He has pictures to go along with it, which I’m not able to reproduce here. But when you see the differences, it’s incredibly effective. Actually, here let me use images from his site to illustrate. Check out this photo of him, versus this cartoon-rendition of his face. The theory that he poses behind this phenomenon, is that when the physical details of a character are not as detailed (that is, more generic), it becomes easier for your mind to imagine yourself in that character’s place. Like, the little picture of yourself your mind carries can be more easily mashed onto the pictures in the book, causing identification with that character. Whereas, if a character is drawn in in greater detail, your mind’s picture of you is less easily projected outward, since the details don’t match.
I think this is exactly what the problem with the header photo on blogs is. What you want out of a blog is a place where you can sort of see somebody else from the inside out. It’s like you’re putting on the costume of who they are. You come to imagine what they look like based on how they write, what they think about, how they feel their way through life. A stupid little photo of you forces me back outside of your skin, and makes me see you as somebody else, rather than allowing me easy entry to identify with you. It doesn’t matter what you look like. You look like how I picture you. My imagination is much more powerful than your digital camera.
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