I was looking at Twitter today and everyone on the net uses photos of themselves for profile pictures. Our Myspace and Facebook profile have photos of us and we upload photos from our computer, phone and wi-fi enabled cameras to Flickr, Zoomr and Facebook. We do all of this with no thought or effort.

It’s funny because when I was younger and on my Penitum I 66Mhz Hewlet Packard PC running Windows 3.1, I was an AOL 2.0 user. We were on dial up and my parents didn’t have a separate phone line so Internet time was sacred to me. I was using Tripod, Geocities and Livejournal. What was missing was a photo of me. Digital cameras were brand new and expensive and webcams were simply too far off in quality and in price.

One day, circa 2000, my grandmother payed a premium for a photographer to take some photos of me and have them digitized via his scanner. I received a couple of JPEGs and I was amazed that now all of my social networks could have photos to attach to my username. Looking back, all of these sites were full of profiles that had pictures of objects but no photos. We take for grated the fact that all of us have digital pictures of ourselves but it wasn’t long ago when an 8 ball or football was your avatar.