Commentary: “What is filtered out? What flavours or styles are added? The word filter has been used in many domains, but usually to describe a process where something is removed” (Rettburg 21).
Whenever I think about filtering, I almost think of it like a very thin sheet of tissue paper. You have an image or a photograph that you lay the tissue paper on top of and it distorts it in some way. Yet, you can still tell what the original image is. Then you add a different color tissue paper. It’s very thin, so you can still see what the image is, but it’s even more distorted. Living in the 21st century, I think of filters this way due to the way I am constantly using filters for my own photographs that I forgot what a true filter is. When we apply photo filters, we actually are getting rid of different aspects of the photo. Sometimes, I use lighter filters to get rid of blemishes, or darker filters to get rid of my pale skin. I am getting rid of certain aspects of my image, but by doing so I’m also adding to my image.
Making Connections: “You can tear out pages or glue photographs over prompts you don’t want to use, but the journal does provide very clear rules for how you should represent your baby’s first year”(Rettburg 22).
Are filters the cause of our journaled baby lives? Are filters the inspiration to having things look a certain way, or are filters a product of having things a certain way? When we are born, our lives are journaled in a baby book in a certain way. Then, we are expected to go to pre-school, elementary school, high school, college, and finally get a job, which we have been preparing for since our relatives began asking the question, “So what do you want to do when you grow up?” They should be concerned, considering that when you aren’t working, you’re preparing for work. Is this the custom that began filters? In our society, this expectation of working has been around for centuries for everyone. Everyone’s guide to education and work is laid out the same, why shouldn’t the small portion of when we aren’t working not be? Filters are the new way to not only work like everyone else, but look like everyone else, have the same family like everyone, and act like everyone else. You can choose what filters that you do and don’t want, just like the photographs. Yet, it’s almost impossible to escape the same format of the journal.
Analysis: “A photo album is not a photo album if there are no photos in it, and it is not a family photo album if all the photos are of landscapes” (Rettburg 30).
Is a genre really a filter? Take two photo albums side by side, one is filled with baby pictures, and one is filled with wedding photos. No one would say that the wedding album is a filtered version of the baby album, but they would describe them as two different objects. There has to be a point to where something isn’t just filtered, but it’s a whole new image, a whole new idea, or a whole new person. When do humans reach this point? I disagree with Rettburg on her topic of genres as filters, because if you completely alter the main idea of something, it’s not just filtered. There has to be a stopping point of filtering and accept that there is a point to where you jump off the cliff of filtering and enter a whole new outlook. Rettburg also talks about filtering coffee in her analogy, “Technically the coffee filter does stop the ground coffee beans from getting into the pot beneath, but the point of a coffee filter is to add flavour to water by slowing its ow through the coffee beans” (Rettburg 21). When you take that same coffee and add in creamer, sugar, flavor, and milk, when do we finally call black coffee a cappuccino?
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