Tuesday, July 29, 2014

#nofilter

Sometimes, the truth hurts. 

It hurts so much that we'd rather pretend it wasn't the truth.

And guess where the best place to be untruthful is?

Ding, ding, ding!

That's right folks... the internet.

Thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and photo-sharing services like Instagram and Flickr, we can literally pretend to be whoever, and whatever, we want to be.

Never were Shakespeare's words "All the world's a stage, and all of the men and women merely players," more true than they are today. Thanks to the internet (generally) and social media (specifically) all the world really is a stage - quite literally.

I first came across the hashtag #nofilter a few months ago. Being a bit of a social media neophyte, I obviously had no clue what it meant. The #nofilter tag is actually one of Instagram's most popular hashtags. It's used by "humblebragging" Instagram users to let their followers know they've posted a picture without using one of Instagram's built-in filters.

And guess what?

Ding, ding, ding!

11% of the time (which translates to over 8.6 million photos) it's a big, fat, lie.


A website dedicated to calling-out Instagram's #nofilter fakers, aptly called Filter Fakers, was recently developed so that people could check if a filter was used on a photo or not. Now, when you suspect one of your "friends" of being a filter faker you can use the Faker Catcher tool to uncover the truth.

  jack doesn't think you can handle the truth

I started thinking about filter fakers when I realized I was addicted to Instagram filters. Every time someone took a #nofilter picture of me, I'd be disappointed with it. The truth is, I looked like myself but had gotten so used to seeing myself through the forgiving, and filtering, lens of Instagram that I forgot what I actually looked like. 

I've never worn makeup because I made the conscious decision to look like myself a long, long time ago. Ditto for Photoshop. So why filters? 

I blame social media. Because of it, people's lives are becoming more aesthetic than authentic with every "like."

When I look at the news feeds of people who share every detail of their personal lives, from what they had for breakfast to what they look like in bed (#nofilter, of course!), I wonder: is that really your life or is it just a carefully curated illusion of the one you want your 2,700 Facebook friends to think you lead?

“Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Social media can be blamed for a lot of things, including but not limited to: narcissism, cyber bullying, slut shaming, neknominating and, sadly, worse.   

If you haven't heard of the hashtag #JadaPose consider yourself lucky.  

It refers to the position a 16-year-old rape victim named Jada was photographed in while unconscious. After the photos were posted online, social media users started posting pictures of themselves in the same position with the hashtag #JadaPose.

According to this article from The Guardian, "Jada's case didn't happen in a bubble. It happened in a world that teaches women and girls, from an ever younger age, that their entire worth and value is defined by their looks and sexual appeal to men. That they have to be sexy enough, but not too sexy. That even if they are abused, assaulted or raped, it is their "reputation," not that of their attackers, that will be destroyed."

In the end, I guess social media can't really be blamed for society's ills. Society, and the people that make it up, can.

PS. I realize that the fact that I'm about to post a link to this blog post on Facebook is highly ironic.