Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: Chapter 2 and 3

SEEING OURSELVES THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 2: Filtered Reality

Starting with skin tone bias and getting to baby journals. Let's see where this chapter goes. What do I start off knowing about filters? I guess in terms of photos, that the kids all know which filters they prefer, and use them on all their snapchats and insta photos before they post them. A filter is used to remove imperfections.

Baby journals. I have two of them. The first is chock full of notes, photos, and journal entries. The second, not so much. Third child didn't even get a journal. Who had time to write reflections and paste in locks of hair with all those babies?? The books are like the authors describe: written prompts, charts to fill in, spaces for specific photos. The Sprout Baby app sounds like overkill. Who needs all that info every day? Some moms focus a bit toooo much on baby.

Filtering out content: "Twitter filters out long form writing, requiring us to limit ourselves to 140 characters at a time." The idea that social media filters out certain types of people who aren't "neoliberal subjects" seems accurate and reminds me of my favorite YA book of all time, "Feed" by M.T. Anderson. "An effective neoliberal subject, Marwick argues, ‘attends to fashions, is focused on self-improvement, and purchases goods and services to achieve “self-realization.”" What a bore. No wonder social media doesn't entice me.

What is this emotional contagion experiment on Facebook? Is that ethical? Were the users aware that they were test subjects?  Yikes! Facebook filters our behavior...

Back to the baby journals. The authors say that we save the moments in photos that we think we are supposed to share because we've seen other baby books. I disagree. I think we save the joyful moments that we want to remember.  Why would I want to save and cherish photos of the sleepless nights and spit up on new clothes? It's ok to let those moments go. Are we acting to the logic of a filter? Maybe we just want to capture the important milestones, and the filter isn't the driver.

Photo filters. They make ya look better. "Seeing ourselvs through a filter allows us to see ourselves anew." SkinneePix, OMGosh.  Reminds me of DFW's bit in Infinite Jest about the video phone and how everyone used a filter, and then they started staging their surroundings, and then the filter wasn't enough and everyone had to buy masks and then prosthetic faces and bodies to use for videoconferencing. It was hilarious and eerily accurate, written 20 years ago. 

On skin tone bias:

Even today it can be difficult to take a photo of a light skinned and a dark skinned person together without losing all detail in one or the other face.

This is so accurate. My son wanted to show me a pic of him and "his boys" at a house party. But there were two pictures: a "black kid pic" and a "white kid pic." Because in one photo, you could see the faces of the white kids, but the black kids were just eyes and teeth. In the other photo, the whitest kids were like lightbulbs, but you could see the even the darkest black kids clearly.  So funny that the kids just know to take two photos of the group.

Chapter 3: Serial Selfies

The premise is that we need to look at feeds, not individual posts or photos.  Social presentation is cumulative. Kalina and Lee's projects do not sound appealing to me.  Let me look them up. Yeah, that type of project holds no interest for me. (Athought watching Hsieh's hair grow might be vaguely amusing.) Maybe that's why I'm not that interested in producing or consuming social media? It's the visuals I have no interest in. I like to read blogs... Rebecca Brown's video, on the other hand, was awesome! Maybe the notes and the purpose made it more relevant and less narcissistic/artsy. 

Ah, the profile photo. Stress! I have no profile photo on my account at NJIT, and they ask me about it every semester. Procrastinating. Used Snoopy here at Kean, and it's ok.

Photobooths are so much fun. Bald booth, fat booth, etc. The coolest photo booth was the one we hired for my husband's birthday party. It was a digital photo booth with a green screen and everyone could add backgrounds, props, celebrities. Huge fun for everyone to just play around in.