January 03, 2018
So, what is with it with millennials and photo filters on social media?
As technology matured from a phone with a camera to a phone with a front camera we’ve gone bonkers in how we show off our friends, families, food, cats and dogs.
Professional photographers once used filters to correct photos. Amateurs took multiple photos to get a good picture. In the early days of the filter revolution from Instagram, Flikr and Tumblr, filters helped you enhance photos. They made the sad whompy photo on your cell phone look amazing.
But now millennials have co-opted the entire thing. With SnapChat and Facebook, we are in a different era of filters, or lenses, as they are officially called. These lenses animate your face and transform you into a different person. No longer do we want to simply look better, we are now looking different. And there are many apps for that. Do you remember Pokemon go? That was lenses working in the real world.
What concerns us beyond the out of world images is why? Perhaps it all weighs on the idea of perception, and performance. Young people are much too concerned with how they are perceived and will put on a performance to hide who they truly are.
A UK survey recently revealed that 67 percent of women worry about their appearance, more often than finances, relationships, or even professional success. Filters and Lenses seem to be engaging completely with the idea of self worth, self imaging and identity.
Perhaps we forgot what fun it is to be young and be able to worry about the insignificant. That millennials may simply see all of this as just fun, covering up and imposing images on the selfie, is just a cute turn technology is taking. For now, we simply have to get used to oversized glasses and dogs faces with drooping tongues speaking to us. We certainly don’t want to go back to landlines that failed after rain or cameras that required the precision of a Swiss watch to focus.