Sontag, "A capitalist society requires a culture based on images, it needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and self. Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society. As a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for the rulers). The production of images furnishes a ruling ideology, social change is replaced by a change in images."
The mechanical sight of a camera is a curtain that feels nothing and chooses nothing. But can bridge sight into a narrow frame that can become an image worth making.
The camera gives human beings the ability to judge others. It is amazing how many people expose themselves to mindful tyranny under the social media's facade of communication. Social media is exploiter under the guise of community.
It really is a way to advertise your life and state this facade is who I think I am.
Images advertise our internal needs. They announce our current self image, that is always changing. Social media analyzes people's trends on their sites and use these trends as suggestions for consumer ads. The hook is always deeper in the mouth if you think someone likes you as you are.
We have accepted the social media dictum, all is seen, observed and judged, as cameras proliferate our society, spy on us in streets, homes and buildings.
We have given our private self to the masses through corporate controlled media.
We look past our social and political needs, to instead, move more toward narcissistic entertainment. We begin to rationalize the continuous brutal greed as necessary to fulfill our wants. Instead of a real dialogue with others we put a barrier between us and them through image creation or should I say image facades.
We are under the spell of material objects. Not a relationship built on trust with the external reality but now subjects to be exploited in a status driven grab for vanity.
Image proliferation will only grow in magnitude as we become gold miners in a false pretext of authentic subjects none of which has importance or value to enhance the lives of others.
In today's market place image creation pacifies the crowd to partake in an activity that has value not in what is produced (as a representation of an emotional connection) but in what is said about it. If it gets traction on social media then it is worth the exhibition of internal self. And for the ad makers, it is a gold mine to be exploited and continually duplicated until the water faucet of hits and sales dries up.
We lose sight of the real game of corporate media, the slight of hands as they feed us dopey humor or tantalizing mayhem, to keep us in an abnormal state, sedated with images of possibilities that we will never experience.
We objectify ourselves in photos, present ourselves to the outer world, and at the same time we subjectively wish we could connect with something real.
Our feelings shown in exaggerated theatre, exploited by media to further gather unlimited amounts of information on us to exploit us like cattle in this ever expanding consumer society.
Images are not real, they reflect, look back on our present experience. The future is only endings of moments in the now. What kind of feeling can you have in the present if all you are thinking about is the image you created during the first hand experience.The aftermath of an experience is the end not the beginning of the actual experience.
It would seem we are satisfied with a copy rather than the original. We have entered Plato's Cave and it appears we are satisfied with a shadow of, rather than the real deal.
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