We live in the world of trends. Every day social networks offer us thousands of cheap, bold and simple ways to remind the rest of the world of our existence.
Sometime before you took pictures of yourself in the elevator, in the restroom, together with your pet and applied magic Instagram filters to it, and today you are welcome to turn out even more information about yourself. It is believed that there are no limits to creativity. So you think – “Why not?“– and quickly take an #AfterSex selfie.
Why are we so upset having no opportunity to tell the world about ourselves? They say we’ve stopped communicating with each other. Yet there are so many social networks today, there are millions of users, of real people who write thousands of messages daily, take thousands of pictures of themselves and everything around in order to escape from real loneliness and boredom! But dozens of likes given to carefully processed pictures make us even more dissatisfied – we want more recognition, fame, comments, communication – all those things that we now hunt for, and after having received them, immediately forget about it.
It is worth-while to think why we grab our smartphone and turn on the camera in the best moments of our lives. Imagine – after a nice boat ride you are asked about your impressions and all you have to say is that it has taken you too long to adjust the flash of the camera or select the most successful image to load, so you haven’t got enough time to duly appreciate the beauty of the coast. It’s time to diagnose a case, then. You fall to pieces of photographic fragments but still fumble the touch screen with your fingers, anticipating your colleagues in a stuffy office to be jealous. Perhaps in this case you get more stress than your colleagues do, don’t you?
Probably all this seems rather pessimistic to you. Well, unfortunately these are recognized facts about our human psychology. Back in the mid-20th century famous philosopher and semiology specialist Vilem Flyuser suggested that human memory dies together with emotions, and technical image takes their place. How did you spend your vacation last summer? Quite often in response to such questions our memory returns vivid images of certain moments in time – where you gather about the fire with friends, smiling and drinking beer, for instance. Our brain carefully stores pictures but not memories, and those pictures replace our experience. As a result we have something like a photo book in our head and a sneaking feeling of loss in our soul.
French short motion picture ”Lost memories” directed by Francois Ferrachi shows how real life can be easily substituted by photos and videos. As a result, the main character, young Parisian in 2020 loses his sweetheart along with all the data erased from the memory card of his devices. We don’t really have to wait until 2020 to see such things happening in the streets of modern cities. Before putting on an “Instagram-smile” and pressing the ritual photo-button just take a look around. Perhaps, there is something more important in your life than the necessity to share the image of yourself in a new bathing suit with your followers.
Photo: Shooty
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