Marleigh V. D.

Bonnie Robinson

ENGL 1117 35&53

10 March 2019

Friends, let’s take a journey through my recent Instagram stories. Yesterday, I posted an ask asking for “weird music”. Five of my followers delivered, with everything from a sea shanty to binaural beats. My favorite song was a sort of elecro-funk song, sent to me by a girl who is very much cute and very much in Alaska.

Before my weird music venture came four photos from my trip to North Carolina for a Quaker clerking workshop. This set includes four photos: the first of a view out the plane, the second a view from inside the plane, the third a drawing I did at a diner, my mediums being ketchup on lettuce, and the fourth being a video of a domino pattern that I made when I was waiting for the other Friends to arrive. None of these photos had filters.

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Prior to the documents of my journey, I posted a screen recording of a scene from Avatar: The Last Airbender (SECRET TUNNELLLL), and before that a link to the Queer Eye season three trailer, and before that my Oma (grandmother) looking at herself with the ‘dog ears’ filter.

There! There is a filter! It did make my Oma’s eyes a little bigger and her skin a little blurred, but it also gave her dog ears and a dog nose. Let’s find another filter.

I posted polls to see if my followers disliked the same random things that I dislike (Ayn Rand, Supreme, vaping in public spaces, plain cabbage, and 13 Reasons Why). No filters. I posted a picture of a waterfall braid done into my hair. I looked at filters to add to this photo, but decided that the original photo portrayed real life the best.

Before this, pictures of a custard, a stew, and a cake that I made. All of these had filters to better show off how the food looked in real life, as the camera did not completely pick up the beautiful colors and textures.

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Before this, a photo of my TV at home when I re-watched Black Panther (for the fifth time), and before that, photos I took while getting ready for a concert I was in. None of these photos had filters, as I had plenty of natural light to illuminate my photos. I’ll end our journey through my Instagram there.

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In the past, I have used filters to lessen the severity of my acne in a photo, to make my skin look evenly pale, to emphasize the current color of my hair, etc. Now, I mainly use filters to make food look as good in the photo as it did in real life and to make photos more ‘artsy’. It is less and less that I find myself using filters to make my skin look better or my eyes darker.

What changed?

For one, I am posting fewer photos of my own face, and when I do, the focus has often shifted from pure vanity to the cake I am decorating, or my artsy hairstyle, or my expression. On January 10th, for example, I burst into tears during an orchestra concert and had to leave. I took a picture to document the experience and posted it, for some reason. I did not add a filter, instead opting to let my eyes and cheeks show their redness.

Another reason is that I realized just how rarely I see photos of other people, especially girls, with acne who are happy. Makeup is fine and beautiful, and some lucky few actually have clear skin, but most of us don’t, and the imbalance between those we see who wear makeup and those we see who don’t have made us believe that faces with makeup on (which is fine) are what is normal and to be expected (which is not fine). I wanted to post photos so the people who follow me, the majority of whom are teenagers, to have another face with acne showing to look at, because when I see photos of girls with acne, I feel so. much. better. about. myself.

I started thinking about filters after reading chapter two of Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves” by Jill Walker Rettburg. This is due to the subject matter of chapter two, which was filters. Rettburg said:

“In radiology a filter
can block out certain wavelengths in an x-ray beam. “

Poetry. Rettburg also wrote about another form of media, the ‘Sprout Baby App’. Of this app, she wrote “Sprout Baby App is an example of how an app can streamline and
limit our options for personal expression even more than pre-digital
media.”

I would like to snootily snoot snoot snoodle Jill Walker Rettburg for NOT using the oxford comma in the title of her book, and I would like to thank myself for checking D2L before I posted this, which reminded me to add two hyperlinked in-text citations. Zing.

Work(s) Cited:

Rettberg, Jill Walker. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology:
How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and
Shape Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137476661.0004.