Have you seen a photo of your grandmother in her younger years?
Photos like that are special, valuable and…real.
Now take a look at this. A similar image popped onto my Instagram feed recently:
Every selfie you have ever posted online is out there. Forever.
As if this was not enough, this appeared on my Instagram news feed. Whereas the image above makes me laugh, this one brings me to tears.
I do not know who the girl on the photo is. And I cannot understand why she would want to look like the one on the right.
Right-girl looks all wrong: her vampire-ish eyes and balloon-ish lips freak me out.
Oh, and she’s not real.
Regardless of everything that is wrong with this picture, my social media feeds are filled with similar fake versions of people I used to know.
An app store search revealed that selfie-editors are spoilt for choice.
This ridiculous practice is apparently not frowned upon. It should be.
Your edited selfie tells me that:
- You don’t like the way you look.
- You have intentionally misrepresented the way you look. “Why?!” is what I want to know. According to whose standards?
- It makes me wonder: Do you even HAVE standards? Do you know what YOU like and dislike? I mean how can you, if you can’t even live with an image of yourself?
- If you present yourself by means of a fake image created in virtual reality, what part of you is real?
I gave one app a try.
Here I am with my colleague, Bombeleni. This is what we actually look like.
My cellphone’s “beauty camera” took this photo:
My face looks fuzzy. Our skin tones don’t look quite right. It is just not real, regardless of how small the changes are.
To be honest, I’d rather look like this:
…than to upload a fake version of myself, expecting people to actually like it.
And that’s it for now.
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