What is with the half-face photo thing for people on webpages?

I really don’t get around much on the web, you may have noted, but now it seems that, everywhere I go—friends, acquaintances, total strangers—they all seem to be putting half their faces on their webphotos.

Is this cool?  Why?

--Perhaps this is like getting a tattoo—a way for deeply conformist ~individuals~ who lack unique personalities to think to themselves that they have expressed something notable about themselves.  They think they can do this by putting some ugly blotch on their bodies (usually they do dislike or are insecure about their bodies, or they wouldn’t try to cover/deface them).  Or, as is so often the case, they’re shallow (and insecure) and can’t express, or have no confidence to express themselves, through their minds as well as bodies.  Is the half-face an extension of the tattoo aesthetic?  The tattooed person says: “here’s a tattoo that externalizes something about me than I can’t communicate or can’t be bothered to and that I want you to see and remark upon.”  The half-face person says: “I’m really quite mysterious and full of remarkable qualities, but, tee-hee, I’m not going to show you all of them until you stroke my ego enough to wonder (though I can stroke it myself just by looking at half of me and thinking of you) what the rest of ME is really like.”

I’ll say this for tattooed people, though—it could be their first and only contact with ink, and in a way that can’t be lamented.  Best tattoo guy I ever knew was a guy named Tracy, or something, that I worked with.  He was a bartender with a motley string of tattoos down his left arm (he was tattoo before tattoo was cool—old school), and he had about four that were ex-girlfriends.  So he’d have “Sheila”: line through it; “Wendy”: line through it; “Debbee”: line through it; “I mean Debbie”: line through it, etc.  Just goes to show, a chick does love a man with tattoos.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to sidetrack into tattoos; I grasp that they have a long history—Nazis putting them on Jews, and so on—and I obviously don’t want to take on all the people with PhDs in tattoos.  They know their uniqueness, and they needn’t deign to express themselves by noting the likes of me.

--it is a truth universally propagated by scientists (you know, those geniuses), that humans naturally are attracted to and like and trust people with symmetrical faces.  Most people aren’t blessed like that.  Most people have halves of their faces they prefer.  So they post those, the ones they like the most or think are most attractive.

--it’s just trendy (like tattoos).  You see one person do it, and you think: “hey, that’s neat; I’ll do it, too,” but you don’t realize 40 million other people just clicked on the same thought.

--in a world when people expose so much of themselves constantly—and, indeed, in many ways _have_ to (even those who would prefer not to), you just have to show something, so half a face is at least something.

Or is it something else?  Are those tiny pictures the web has given us just so small that you can’t put a whole face in there? 

Well, at least I’ve got a face.  Blue, querulous, Alfalfan, but at least a face.

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