The Make-Believe World of Pictures

Photo from www.gabrielsaplontai.ro

It’s so easy to have a gorgeous picture nowadays. You have Adobe Photoshop that clears all blemishes, alter one’s skin tone, and warp your body to the perfect figure you may never attain in real life. You have Adobe Lightroom that edits the lighting of the picture, its brightness and contrast, and other technical stuff, which I do not and would not wish to understand, to enhance your picture. You have DLSR cameras, those evil cameras which seem to make anyone behind the lens as gorgeous as a model.

It becomes so convincing that you yourself is convinced that the picture is so you that you upload it in Facebook. What a hallucination! Some gullible person then views it and before you even know it you have numerous likes and all praising comments on your picture. Let me shove some reality into you: These people who rave and comment are not actually praising you. Subconsciously, they are praising the photographer, who by his art, makes any uninteresting subject look attention worthy with just a click and a little processing. To a point, it looks like idolatry, where an object venerated by people is the one getting all the praise for the efforts of the one who truly worked for it.

I have this theory. If you want to view if a good looking boy/girl in Facebook is as good looking in person, go view their tagged photos. There you will see the reality, faces unguarded, faces raw from editing and other manipulation. This might not work if the user selectively chooses the photos where one would be tagged, because by all means any person could un-tag oneself to submerge oneself again in the make-believe world of beauty and glamor.

I don’t get the point why people have to overly enhance their pictures. I’m guessing it’s because of self esteem issues or some craving of attention. To those people, please help yourself and buy some cartons of self esteem and boxes of attention in you local grocery store, or have it delivered by your doorstep. That might work. However, I really think that it’s being pretentious. I’m actually glad when some blogger friend I met told me that I look the same in person as in my pictures. Let me tell you one thing, I look better in person. Haha. Kidding.


Here's a song for all those people:

Era of the Like

Photo from www.design-milk.com

You like it when people comment on what you say, no?

Welcome to the era where everyone is hungry for likes, reposts, testimonials, raves, and pokes. This is when a lot of people become so superficial, when that much needed promotion of one’s work is relatively rampant in social networking sites, begging and buying to be noticed through a simple link or an invitation to visit what they have to say. It’s pathetic as Shalani Soledad’s hosting can be.

We like it when people like what we say even though saying or writing it is against or not fully based on one’s discernment. We are all fixated to the idea of belongingness in this lonely world, where conformity had been the basis of good citizenship, procurement of licenses, and grading systems in schools. These are the times where almost everyone thinks alike, act alike, and speak alike. Should one dare to say otherwise, persecution will sure follow. We have been clones, poets, speakers of everyone we see around us, copying little by little one’s beliefs and values and assimilating it to ourselves day by day.

We are the people who are glued to the standardization and expectations of the society. Truly, this has lead to the deterioration of our creative faculties and death of rational thinking, accepting all information there is to procure, holding them as truths without even processing what was even said. We have been consumers for so long, it time we do otherwise.

We live in an era where the consumers dictate to the writers what they want to read, writing to please the audience. This somehow concerns me, when was the last time the writer wrote to please himself? I believe we must do something to revive the glorious ways of thinking that led man to its present state.

Like this? Poke me. Leave a comment!