Words are daily manipulated to change the meaning of photographs. To instill confusion of what you see and by doing this making it easier to use propaganda to convince someone something is happening in real life instead of a created existence in cyber space. We are becoming a video game society easily tempted with bells and whistles to entertain us but not educate us on the true nature of social media's ever expanding role and control in our lives.
Joel Meyerowitz from an introduction to Cape Light, " All I'm trying to do is pass experience. I see things-this is my life- I look: I make visual images. It's the best in me- the only thing I can do. It's what I've done since I was a kid, I feel things. We are emission centers. We receive sensations and we put them out. That's what artists do. I can receive on any given day, more or less clearly, depending upon how in touch with the signals I am. If I'm in a good place, where there's a lot of visual activity, I become super sensitive. I receive many signals, and I pick and choose among them. As they get deeper into my center, to the core of this receiver, I feel more strongly about them, and I say this is the one that I am moved by. "
As a photographer are you receptive to the inner/outer relationship of creating good images by immersing yourself into your intuitive receptors.
Inanity, a lack of sense or ideas. A stillness, a gap between you and the the world. Humans are becoming inanimate objects. Lifeless beings more concerned with their mechanical devices than living their lives present in each sacred moment.
There is a hallow feeling now spreading across the worried faces of people, as if they are aware of their lives changing but don't know into what. This creates anxiety and a need to be seen and heard, Look at me please, I exist!!
To take time to feel and truly see something external to their needy ego's demands to be seen is almost impossible when they succumb to the social medias betrayal of individuality.
This inner vacuum extends into their lives they are trying to comprehend. Social media is becoming the new collective consciousness of the masses. A chance to be seen and heard and appreciated for your efforts. Except social media is a distraction from living not a way of living. It is hollow and a cheap way to expose yourself as it sucks up your time, placates your inner worries with brief moments of likes and dislikes.
Where is your common sense and your purpose in life? It certainly can't be re-blogging simplistic answers to universal and complex questions of our existence. If it were that easy then we wouldn't need social media. But if social media confuses you and separates you from living your life then you have fallen into the scam of powerful interests. You are being exposed to fruitless hours of addiction to a screen that only limits your ability to live not enhance it.
We have finally been assimilated into the economy of the money transaction. In the past we were outsiders in the deal making. We had the ability to be objective and through this objectivity we had some power over the advertising agencies and their relentless aggression to make us buy stuff.
Now, with corporate social media, we allow them to collect personal information from us for free. This information categorizes us into a caste system of potential product sales through targeted ads.
In the social media world the collective spurts out what is right and what is wrong instantaneously. If it happens to sit well with you in these seconds of comprehension then you can like it and then forget about it and move on to judge something else in the collective spirit of cyberspace an external wizardly of smoke and mirrors.
In reality however nothing has changed nothing is accomplished. It is a side show to get you involved in the trivial, mindless explosion of controlled entertainment, while the real movers and shakers use their slight of hand to take more from the suckers herded onto devices that are only used for confusing the truth.
A new religion is born.
Our lives are speeding up as we accumulate more and more frivolous snap shots and banal information to sedate us, as our society sinks deeper and deeper into a collective zombie mind without the ability to recognize the manipulation of our animal instincts to herd together for support.
And because of these animal instincts we are herded in to corrals of social hierarchy and ads are sent to you given your station in life.
Still images have a separate authority, a new narrative that living in the moment does not have. That is the addiction to self awareness. By constantly taking pictures of your life, you change the narrative of your moment and are actually imitating a screen play, a movie of someone, a character in your own narrow reality. By stopping time, it might appear that you have empowered yourself and your future narrative by projecting through social media and to the world your cubicle of time/space. And by doing this one is being mislead.
You are actually creating a likeness of yourself and this objective life you are leading becomes a new likeness to what the collective dictates as acceptable behavior and you are literally immersed in a fake life that has no ultimate significance, while the real world politics is being centered under a different reality of collective minds manipulating the masses. We now listen for shallow words, one word summaries of our lives, maybe a half sentence to describe who we are.
