“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology” Chapter 2 Reflection

“I wish I had her looks,” “Why can’t I be the CEO,” “I wish I was built like him,” “I wish I could do the things that she does,” “Why can’t I be her.” Some of these thoughts and others like it may run through our heads a million times a day, so what do we do about them? Well, a small few may go to the gym if they see that someone else has a better body than them, but why do that when we have an app that makes us look smaller? If we see our friends with their happy kids and perfect family, we may make a resolution to spend more time with family, but why do that when we can just post a photo with the family looking happy and together. Instead of truly improving our lives, we use filters to not just fix them, but to create our perfected twin version of ourselves. Today’s society uses filters to create not just a perfect image of themselves, but to create whole new “people.” With literal examples of creating new people, filters that perfect our visual selves, personality, and our lives, humans are obsessed with being anything but themselves.

In America especially, we idolize celebrities and focus more on their relationship status then a natural disaster. Who are we truly idolizing? Over half of all the singers and rappers have changed their name, and most of the time someone else is writing their songs. In an article by Jill Rettburg, this act of forming celebrities can relate to her analogy of a baby book. “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). When artists want to become famous, they sign on with record companies and managers who tell them everything they need to do. Change their name, change their looks, change their songs. They keep certain parts about the artists, then morph the rest. Humans crave to filter themselves and even admire the people who go to the extremes of filtering. Video games are another example of this behavior. The addictive activity allows people to exit real life and enter a fictional world where you can create your avatar to be whoever, look however, and do whatever you desire. One video game that revolves around this idea are the Sims games, where the entire object of the game is to basically create your own lifestyle. People are addicted being someone they’re not, whether it’s a video game or filtering real lives. We spend hours locked into games that let us escape our real lives, filter our body image, and envy those who filter their identity for fame.  No wonder humans are so obsessed with filters, the most successful people in American society are also the most filtered. What does that say about how to achieve the American Dream and how to be successful? Everyone tells you to be yourself, but where does that get you in life?

Picture a bowl of cake batter. Doesn’t matter what kinda, but it’s just plain cake batter. Then you pour it in different pans, deciding to add sprinkles in the batter. Throw the pans in the oven and bake them. After they are baked, you take frosting and frost each one, then stack the cake layers and frost them together. It’s still a bit plain, so you decorate it with flowers and frosting designs. When do we stop calling it cake batter and call it cake? With filters, when do we stop calling it “filtered” and say it’s a whole new image? There are a million ways to filter ourselves, from changing the contrast in a selfie to having two different profiles on Instagram, one with the family-friendly version and the other with R-rated images and captions. This act of two different profiles is what Rettburg discusses in her article of having two different genres. “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). When are the two filtered profiles of one person not just filtered, but a whole new image and face? With the pictures of ourselves, we use filters to cut out our imperfections, make our skin look better, muscles more defined, and even our bodies to be skinner. When socializing, others may state that someone is, “two-faced.” This means that they have different personalities around different people, applying a filter for each one and taking away certain aspects of their personality for each. Not only can people be “two-faced,” but it is now popular to create Finstas, which are private accounts that my peers and many, many others create to post things that range from being embarrassing to being illegal that are only meant for close friends. Between the two accounts, most of the time it’s hard to imagine that they represent the same person. After the makeup, the contrast, exposure, brightness, tint, and photoshop, when does the build up of filters create a whole new image? One of my classmates, Ian, created a perfect example of this idea when they took a picture of a light and completely transformed the image into something new and unrecognizable. When we filter our lives as much as we do, we hit a point to where our original selves become unrecognizable. Filtering isn’t a bad thing, we all have a zit we want to cover up or a bad experience that we would rather filter out and forget about. Yet, when the layers of filters alter every aspect of our image, personality, and even life experiences, we change ourselves entirely. Obsession with perfection has obstructed us from noticing that our true selves have been consumed by filters. Instead of looking at others or their profiles to improve yourself, look at the filters that they apply to themselves. Look at the layers of filters you apply to yourself and realize that you’re not truly improving yourself, you’re “improving” you’re copied version of yourself.