May 15, 2016

Photographs are a memory enhancer.  They remind us of our past, our family, friends, events and the things we shared when we were together.  These were personal relics of our past and they had meaning and purpose when we took them.

We take pictures to remember our lives.  Images give us a sense of power.  An immediate reflection of an event no matter how banal and this inspires us because we have taken from our perspective a moment and now have that moment forever.  Pictures are an objective means of analysis.  They are themselves really stepping stones through the space and time we travel in.  Image authenticity depends upon the closeness you are to your subject.  If it is a family member then in all probability you will assume the snap shot represents a true moment captured of your relative.  It will be put in a scrap book and forever more you will remember that moment through the image you are viewing.

Pictures do not stop time.  It is a copy of a moment in time, the expression captured was just a quick facade for the camera. Images are just surface reflections of our internal wants.

What distinguishes us from the herd is our individuality.  And what we photograph, to have meaning for us and for us to share a part of ourselves through our images, is purpose and connection with external subjects.  By having a need to take pictures of something without empathy or interest for the subject means you are just snapping pics of things.  These things have no ultimate meaning or purpose but imitation.

Our family memories, our friends memories, our personal memories are not our own anymore.  There is break away from private moments and public moments.  We have now moved over the line of intimacy with our close friends and family to an all out deterioration of the family unit and our private moments of living who we are.  We are now spectacles to be posted and ridiculed on corporate media sites.  We are reduced to posting our lives in seconds instead of cautious reflection on what we want to present and say.  Everything is speeding up beyond our control and as we get caught up in the tidal currents of celebrity and needy likes, we lose the footing of willful purpose and creating images and words that have special meaning to us and hopefully to others.

The way around this merry-go round of manipulation and surveillance of our lives is to stop and think what am I really doing to our community of people that I share my time with.  Am I going to post something of values or am I going to give into the herd instincts and follow them down a path of exploitation and alienation through focusing my life through a small screen with no connection to who I am and no caring about what I want to express that really matters to me.

Being heard by others is necessary for our ability to feel needed. But we are not heard or listened to
in the important sense of friendship and family but now as strangers posting on other sites with limited words. Social media is an addictive force in our lives.  To be seen, to be seen and heard, to be seen and heard and liked that becomes your center of the universe.

To be part of this abstract technology that allows corporate media to gather info on its willing participants is unnerving.

Social media is self gratifying.  It reduces your world to a screen and that becomes your relationship with the external world.  It is your best friend, all your information is inside this small device. We are being absorbed in this social media collective as if this is living a real life.

Once corporate media gets a whiff of a trend which is so much easier nowadays, because of the amount of free information we give them about ourselves, they can easily make these trends into a selling and buying opportunity.  The great American exploitation of our exposed wants to buy products with hollow meaning. They know our income levels, they know our mental states, our emotions and these are easily manipulated into material needs of safety.

Do we even have a cultural memory now?  When we forget something we just ask our device and this becomes our new memory separate from our own consciousness and others.  Our memories are now being deposited on these devices so we don't have too use our own brains to remember.  That would be to much work, lets just ask social media for all our answers and we happily accept a summary of events instead of remembering our own moments we have lived through.

We don't use sentences to express our feelings, we use short symbols that speed up our thinking process which in turn reduces our ability to use whole sentences with thoughtful responses. Instead we use cliche's and symbols that have taken over our need to compose our own individual words and respond in a reasoned way.

The screen opens, eye candy for the senses. We now can hear, see, and react spontaneously to an outside web of mass propaganda.  The window lights up in your palm, music plays and like Pavlov's dog you react immediately to the hand held device as if it is your creator.

An alternate world draws you in from the outside, the cold world you have been struggling in. It appears benign and you get some likes and start to feel better about yourself and the collective mind begins to dominate your life, hindering understanding with propaganda of wealth, fame and exploitation.  Social media keeps the masses placated through vicarious moments of others continually separating you from your real life experience.