Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: Chapter 2 (Rough Draft)

“Filters have become an important part of popular visual culture. Instagram was one of the first site to really popularize filters, and now they are everywhere, allowing us to make our selfies and other photos look brighter, more muted, more grungy, or more retro than real life.” (Rettberg 21). The term filter can have several connotations. One of the fastest growing uses for the term is referring to the altering of pictures, as described by Jill Walker Rettberg in the previous quote. Filters can, however, be an unconscious decision or influence in many aspects of our lives.

Cultural filters are learned throughout our childhood and cultural upbringings. Culture is defined as the ideas and self-concepts of a group or society in a particular place and time, passing from one generation to the next (sociologydictionary.org). These filters are the subtle “… rules and conventions that guide us, filter out possible modes of expression…” (Rettberg 24). An example of this is what types of photos we put into an album. The pictures are often of birthdays, family events, vacations, and other generally happy moments in our lives. The albums rarely depict upset or angry people, tragic events, or horrifying images. This is due to the cultural filters we have developed. The angry or upset child will likely have been a common occurrence, with a decent chance of being photographed. However, we filter these moments out of our albums, in order to remember the happy times and conform to our cultural expectations. Most of the time, this occurs without even considering it.

Technical filters are those imposed on us by technology or formatting. Rettberg uses the example of a baby book in this chapter. She describes how a book will give you prompts and specific areas to fill in as your baby ages. Rettberg states (22) “A preformatted baby journal can be seen as a technological filter. It is a conventional codex book, which means you cannot easily add very large photos or video or sound, and it has written prompts and spaces allocated to specific kinds of photographs. You can tear out pages or glue photographs over prompts you don’t want to use, but the journal does provide very clear rules for how you should represent your baby’s first year.” Some modes of expression are even more rigid. Many smartphone apps, computer programs, and other forms of media can not be altered in any way. These technological filters are more obvious than cultural filters but, they play a large part in shaping our daily lives.

In today’s world, filters are becoming more and more about changing the aesthetics of a photograph. Filters are used to help us create art from our everyday lives. By adding a filter to a picture, we “defamiliarize” ourselves with an object or scene. The defamiliarization allows us to view the world a little differently than usual. We can make colors brighter, make the background blurry, or turn color into greyscale. The issue is that these defamiliarized images become the norm. They loose their “shock value” and we become anesthetized, or numb, to these pictures.