The amount of picture taking in life has reached an absurd level. I blame Facebook. And girls.

For some reason, us girls are significantly more involved in this life-documenting behavior than our male counterparts.

To verify this, I looked at the past 500 albums recently updated or added by my friends on Facebook and found that only 38 of them were created by guys; that’s 7.6% male participation.

Statistics aside, I think most would agree that picture taking and posting has become a pretty girly practice.

It seems as if every group of friends has their designated “photographer” who willingly snaps photos of the group’s social outings (drunk at a bar), innings (chilling on the couch) and in-betweenings (walking on the street, inside the cab). It’s getting to such an extreme point that I feel that girls are increasingly living their lives for the purpose of it being captured, posted and tagged.

And beyond the number of photographs we post, what is happening in the photographs has become a point of interest as well.

Sure, straight up grins are cute, but we’ve come to realize that smiling in every tagged picture is boring. Girls have been trying to spice it up ever since the photo application was added.

You know the drill: It started with the tongue-out-drunk-face, the upside-down-peace-sign, and don’t forget the popular kiss-your-friend-on-the-cheek.

But now, the tides have turned and it’s all about the “candid” shot that isn’t so candid, is it? There’s the “I’m-in-my-own-world-dancing” pose and the “you-just-said-something-funny-so-I’m-laughing” shot. The craziest part of it all is that the “skinny arm” isn’t weird anymore.

I’ve thought about why we do this and I think I’m on to something. People, and especially girls, have become obsessed with celebrity stalking via Perez Hilton, US Weekly and the likes. For us commoners, Facebook has become the equivalent tool for us to not only stalk our friends, but also become the “star” of our own world.

So even if the real paparazzi aren’t following us out at night, we have our reliable girlfriends who will, in a timely fashion, broadcast to the world on Facebook what we’re doing, where we’re going and with whom we’re dancing and laughing.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.