Facebook Photo Album as Everyday Storytelling Device

Let's say you go on vacation for a week. You travel to some interesting place. How do you tell people about your vacation?

Social media is, among other things, the way that we tell people we know (and, sometimes, people we don't know) about things that happened to us. It's a kind of everyday storytelling medium, a way in which we can relate to the choices made by a filmmaker or novelist. As with any form of narrative, Facebook does not include every event that happened from every point of view. There are two "editorial moments" as which people decide what gets left in the story and what gets cut out: the moment at which they decide to take a picture and the moment at which they decide to post it. In addition to determining what gets left in or out of the story, the person assembling a Facebook photo album can re-arrange the order in which pictures are presented.

I can think of several reasons why this kind of temporal re-arranging may take place. You may want to "set the stage" for people looking through your photo album (assuming they encounter it in a linear fashion, starting at the beginning and clicking the "next" button as they go through the pictures). You may wait until the end of your vacation to take pictures of, say, the hotel in which you stayed. But you may put those pictures at the beginning of your album, to orient the viewer. You may also save a picture that you took of an amazing sunset on the second day of you vacation for the last or next-to-last picture of the album, using it as a kind of climax to the story of your vacation (although, maybe it's just me who does this sort of thing).

Do you group all of the pictures of food together? There's a kind of organizational logic to this from the standpoint of the picture arranger. And yet, I would argue, it leads to an inferior experience for the picture viewer. There's a kind of tedium to seeing picture after picture of food. But if the pictures are placed among other events and thing - trips to the beach, happy people, monuments, etc. - then it might feel more like you are experiencing the vacation as the individual experienced it.

But one wonders how much time people spend on telling stories through Facebook. Would people care about having an abrupt ending to an album? The difference between telling a story and simply putting things up is something a viewer might pick up on, at least sub-consciously.

ABRUPT ENDING