Blog #7 - Jill Walker Rettberg

Seeing Ourselves through Technology by Jill Walker Rettberg

Chapter 2 – Filtered Reality

After reading this chapter I thought it is just fascinating how filters can be so much more than the physical ones like coffee or cigarette filters. The chapter starts by stating “filters can be technological, cultural or cognitive, or they can be a combination of these.” It was interesting to read that Instagram was one of the first sites that popularized filters and now they are everywhere. While by definition filters seem to be a way to remove unwanted data or materials, filters are also used to add certain things like color into an image or flavor like in the case of a coffee filter. This chapter explains that technological filters are those we are able to apply to social media feeds or to blogs. Cultural filters are those norms, rules, or expectations that guide us to express ourselves in different ways. Cognitive filters are those when our body and mind is able to perceive certain things and not others. Often we see a combination of all of these happening or being used all at once.

While technological filters can be seen as a way to enhance the way we express ourselves, these filters also have their limitations. Early on in the chapter we read about baby journals and how these are preformatted to let us know what we are supposed to put into our baby’s journal. These journals can be seen as technological filters. I’ve seen baby journals before and I think they are the cutest thing but since I’m not a mom yet, I never thought deeply about them. The chapter indicates that these baby journals have clear rules as to what should go in them but if we wanted, we could put pictures over the prompts we don’t want to use or we could glue more pages to it. But how can we do this with the many baby journal apps that exist today? Sprout Baby is an app that allows parents to insert pictures of when they are bringing home the baby, baby’s first smile, baby’s first bath amongst others. The app has even clearer rules embedded in it that shows you what is it that you are supposed to add. In this app, you can also track feedings and nap times but like the chapter says, it can streamline and limit your options for expression. You simply can’t tear out or add a page in the digital world of an app.

Twitter and Facebook are some of the social media platforms mentioned in the chapter where we see filters limiting the user in certain ways but not in others. Twitter limits the user in the sense that only 140 characters are allowed to be posted per tweet. Therefore, the user must deliver their message only using that many characters. I think this can be useful because it helps you share what’s really important about what you want to say. But at the same time, it limits you because you have to leave out information that perhaps was not as important but you wanted to share it anyway. I found interesting how all these filters are often combinations of technological, cultural and cognitive filters. Facebook is limited when it comes to the default list of life events they have available for the user to share on their timeline. The chapter points out how they have the option for you to share weight loss as an event but it does not have weight gain in their list. I see this as a cultural and cognitive filter assumption showing that no one wants to share that they have gained weight. It is simply not the norm for someone to announce that they have gained weight. I think that society often advertises skinniness as the best option for your physical appearance and Facebook seems to be aware of that.

SkinneePix is an app that is also aware of the cultural filter related to weight or the preference for appearing skinny. This chapter indicates that technological filters are influenced by cultural filters and whether we like the way our cultural filters are influencing our technological filters or not, I have to agree with the fact that it does influence it. The SkinneePix app is an example presented of this. The app allows you to take pictures of yourself and make you appear skinnier than what you really are. The app was created based on the “use the skinny lens” comments from people. While I don’t think that using this app is the solution for looking skinnier, if that’s what you would prefer to look like, this is a filter people have the option to use if they are comfortable doing so.

The chapter moved on to talk about how early camera film was calibrated to provide good detail for people with lighter skin tones rather than for people with darker skin tone. This is an example of how filters can be both technological and cultural. When I read about this I thought that this showed the lack of importance there is towards darker skin tone people – very much a cultural filter. I was stunned to see how Kodak decided to do something about this only when companies selling dark woods and dark chocolates complained about the lack of quality they were getting for pictures of their products. So products were more important than parents complaining over their children’s school pictures quality? This was an example to see how this skin tone bias is a technological filter yet very much so a cultural filter as well.

The overall topic regarding filters was fascinating to read about. We are constantly running all kinds of information through filters and I think it is just amazing how many of these times we are doing this very much unconsciously. I also think that most of the times we are mostly using a combination of technological, cultural, and cognitive filters rather than using these completely separately.

Chapter 3 – Serial Selfies

This chapter focused more directly on the idea of visual self-representation online – selfies, time-lapse videos, and profile photos. The term selfie is so popular today that it makes you think that it is a thing that people do now that was never done before. However, there is a very high chance that we have all taken a selfie before they were called selfies. Suzanne Szucs is for sure a great example of someone that was taking selfies way before they were called selfies. She took pictures every day for 15 years. She used polaroids then and she exhibits the photos in various configurations. I cannot fully comprehend why selfies are so popular now although people have been taking selfies for a long time. But perhaps the media that we have today has helped them increase their popularity.

Time-lapse videos are another way of self-representation and this chapter does a great job in showing a number of examples of people who have done time-lapse videos. I found all these examples interesting because at times they were so similar to each other and yet so different. Ahree Lee’s video Me and Noah Kalina’s video Everyday were two time-lapse videos uploaded to YouTube in the same month and year. They both went viral but Kalina’s video became even more popular than Lee’s video. The chapter indicated that it seems like race and gender had to do with the difference in commenters’ reception. Commenters assumed that she didn’t smile because she was Asian by commenting ‘lol she’s Asian so she looked the same for the whole thing’. Commenters on Noah’s video instead said ‘y so sad’ or ‘Pocker face’. I think that based in the examples presented in the chapter, commenters in these videos were quick in associating their perception with stereotypes. I was curious to see more of these comments for myself and went ahead and searched these videos. I spent quite some time reading through these comments and noticed that there were a lot of comments on Kalina’s video asking which frame was the one showing his picture taken on 9/11 but there weren’t any clear comments referencing race. When I read over the comments on Lee’s video, what I noticed was that there was a strong attention towards the blonde wig that she wears for one of her pictures. I also noticed other race related comments like ‘so um, this proves that Asians don't age at al’ and ‘Japanese?’. This showing that race and gender did seem to have to do with commenters’ reception towards these videos.

Karl Baden’s time-lapse video was interesting to watch as well. I thought that watching this video was softer on the eyes since it is just a black and white frame and Baden uses the same plain background all throughout the video. Rebecca Brown’s video was the complete opposite to Baden’s. Brown’s video is full of color and the background is constantly changing. She also adds caption to her video where she shares overwhelming things she is going through. What impressed me the most about her video was the way she ended it. She speaks briefly at the end, introducing herself, and saying ‘that was 6.5 years of my life. Woohoo!. Pretty scary stuff.’ She then directs you to choose if you would like to go to her personal channel to see her aside from taking pictures of herself or if you would like to learn more about her hair condition, Trichotillomania, by clicking on a different link. I found her time-lapse video to be the most powerful one because she shared a deep self-representation of what she is going through in different aspects of her life with the world watching her video.

Profile photos was another section this chapter talked about and it connects to our self-representation. This chapter explains it this way ‘a profile picture is a visual expression of identity, and our choice of profile picture photos is clearly a form of visual self-representation.’ As I read through this section, I thought about my profile pictures and I realized that they don’t connect deeply with my identity. In fact, the profile pictures I’ve chosen, I’ve chosen purposely to protect my identity and to avoid self-representing who I really am. But I guess that if I think again, in some way, although I have a hydendria as a profile picture, it is a picture I chose because I thought it was a pretty flower. So in some way it connects to who I am, my likes, my taste. I have also had pictures of landscapes of places where I’ve been, places I love to be at. I would never put a profile picture of something I don’t like at all or a picture of something I can’t relate to.

I think that whether we decide to put a selfie, a picture of a flag or a picture of us with a loved one as our profile picture, in some way, we are self-representing a piece (small or big) of who we are. The idea of self-representation is a broad one and there are many ways we can decide to do this. We could choose to do something like Suzanne Szucs or Rebecca Brown which were two people that really put themselves out there or we can do whichever form of self-representation that we feel more comfortable with.