10 Years Or More!

If you have Finnish friends and they're on Facebook, you probably have noticed that many of them have changed their profile photo to a childhood shot...or even better - a shot taken from when they were babies!
Why?

It was "Old Photos Week" or "Wayback Week"...many have continued to keep their photo of their youthful selves.
This must be a new thing because I do not recall this many profile photo changes specifically from Finns in the last (almost) 4 years that I've lived here.  The photos also had to be a minimum of 10 years old - so I heard.

You can find a very short article here.

There's no real explanation as to why Finns are embracing the idea of posting photos of themselves in diapers, with missing teeth, balding or completely naked (hey - babies get away with EVERYTHING! :) )- only a suggestion from a Helsinki University lecturer as to why...

Here's why (I think) - because whatever Facebook says - aka someone types up a status, shares it and badgers their friends to share it and it suddenly becomes trendy (complete with # hash tags) and if enough people do it - it makes the news.

Some other trends I have seen in the past (and some quite recently) include women (and only women) updating their status with the colour of their bra and pattern (if applicable) printed on it and nothing else.
This made news because it was to raise awareness for breast cancer.  Fair enough - a great cause and it worked.  There was also something about describing your purse's location and if you have a dirty-mind - well, then you have no idea what the woman is talking about.  (I.e.: "on the floor, in the closet, on the counter" etc.)
More recently (aside from these old photos via Finnish people on Facebook) the newest trend is to post a photo of yourself or your children holding a piece of paper or Bristol board with a request to like the photo.
If they got so many "likes" they were able to get:

• A puppy
• A kitten
• A sibling (probably sold in a different aisle than the puppies and kittens)
• Their home cleaned top to bottom by their 3 daughters who offered to do it with tooth brushes...
• _fill in the blank_

I can understand the curiosity in wanting to see how far in the world will a photo asking for "likes" will go and how long it takes to reach that goal of 1 million "likes", but very quickly they were piling up and mimicking the others.

Then I finally found the perfect article explaining it all.  Thank you to the parents who raised the kids and wrote up a sign (last photo) to share with Facebook.

Thank you even MORE Finns for not falling into a "#silly_trend" like that.  

I totally dig the old photos that don't require anything more than a smile...and I probably have "coo'd" or "Aww"'d over a great many of them too.

(And yes, I changed my photo as well - I usually have it as an old photo about 3-5x a year but decided to put it back up and be that much closer to being an honorary Finn.)