A Face to a Name -80s Trend on Social Media


Have you uploaded your photograph, reimagined in the grainy, sepia toned glow of the 1980s, onto social media? Congrats! You are now part of millions who queued up and are still queuing up to be aged backwards by an algorithm, all in the name of a little harmless fun. And it was fun. It always is, in the moment.

But have you ever given it a thought on what’s happening underneath the filter, something our very human, very forgetful brains are not quite built to notice. We are, all of us, terrible at holding on to things. We forget names within seconds of being introduced, we recognise a face across a crowded room and cannot place it. This gap, between knowing of someone and truly knowing them, is one of the oldest and most forgivable of human failings. It is also, it turns out, the one thing that machines have been patiently waiting for us to close.

For years now, the platforms we live with have been collecting the parts of us that don't need a face — what we like, what we fear, what we hope, whom we love, what keeps us up at 2 a.m. scrolling instead of sleeping. They have known our anxieties before our doctors have. They have known our loyalties before we have. What they lacked was almost quaint: a face to go with the file. And now, dressed up as nostalgia, handed over with a smile, we have given them exactly that.

This is the peculiar trick of technology today. It never asks for anything directly. It waits for us to want something trivial enough — a filter, a trend, a moment of collective delight — and lets us hand over the valuable thing as a side effect. Nobody forced the photograph out of us. We offered it, the way we offer most of ourselves now, cheerfully and without much thought, because the alternative - FOMO….sitting out a trend, feels like a social death.

Whether this is sinister or simply the shape of modern life depends, as it always does, on who is asking and why. A face can help a machine recognise us faster at an airport, or serve us an advertisement so precisely aimed it feels like being understood. The same completeness that makes us feel seen is what makes us easier to predict, and therefore easier to lead. This is not new — culture has always been in the business of shaping desire — but the scale and the intimacy of it are new, and we have not yet worked out what we feel about being known this well by something that does not, in any sense, know us back.

We created machines specifically to compensate for human limitation.. The tool we built to serve our memory has turned into something that holds a more complete memory of us than we could ever have of ourselves

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best Indian websites - 2007

Image
Hi, This was an article that appeared in PC World India Nice stuff Santosh ------------------------------------ Technology will dominate the future and the web is clearly one of its greatest manifestations. Forget the dotcom bust that many sceptics will remind you of The Web is going to become our way of life in India . There are enough statistics to point to the rapid growth of the Internet in India – number of connections, e-mail accounts, transaction revenue – all very convincing. But who needs statistics? Just a quick look around will reveal how web is fast replacing traditional brick-n-mortar operations. Be it picking new stocks or new friends, finding a job or a bride, there’s a web way to things that is proving far more effective, and rewarding. Websites today are built with robust understanding of users and available technology. They purposefully pursue fulfilling the needs of their audience but are grounded in strong business reality. And hence, unlike the fairy-tail era gone...
Read more

10 Reasons Marketing Strategy should include the Internet

It may seem surprising but many companies, big and small, have yet to develop a rational Internet marketing strategy. Considering the Internet has now been used effectively by marketers since 1994, any organization without a strategy to utilize the Internet for marketing is probably making a big mistake. For any organization that still does not have a meaningful Internet marketing effort we offer 10 Reasons why you should. 1. The Go-To Place for Information Possibly the most important reason why companies need to have an active Internet marketing strategy is because of the transformation that has occurred in how customers seek information. While customers still visit stores, talk to sales representatives, look through magazines, and talk to friends to gather product information, an ever-increasing number of customers turn to the Internet as their primary knowledge source. In particular, they use search engines as their principle portal of knowledge as search sites have become the leadi...
Read more

Two Weddings and a Funeral

There is something prophetic about the movie title “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” In real life, for most of us, it could be one, two, or three occasions. The number is not the import, the import is that’s roughly how often we meet people who once mattered to us. Old family friends, relations one generation up, neighbours from the homes we grew up in — all exist somewhere in our phones, remembered but unreached. We know their birthdays because Facebook reminds us, and we acknowledge them ‘enthusiastically'   with a cheerful emoji, a quick wish, a sense of obligation fulfilled. We even find ourselves in their cities sometimes — for work, for weddings, or for a holiday — but rarely do we think of meeting. “Next time,” we tell ourselves, comforted by the thought that their faces are just a click away. The photograph on our feed becomes proof that the relationship is still alive. Once upon a time, we didn’t need reasons to meet. People simply dropped in. Someone would be passing throug...
Read more