Instamodel (late)

Huxley proposed the idea that the "ultimate revolution" is becoming gradually more real. Though I'm sure he did not envision people as slaves to their cell phones, this is what comes to my mind when I think of society influencing, or controlling, individuals. Social media is a mega-powerful influence and seems to control the minds of people much like hypnopedia in Huxley's "Brave New World." We scroll through Instagram and are constantly bombarded with thoughts ("this is what happiness looks like...", "Everyone wears that brand", "Wow, I'm getting a lot of likes. I'm finally someone worth noticing!") until they become our truth. I truly believe that whatever we fill our hearts and minds with, we will hold as our ultimate truth. It becomes the standard with which everything should be judged as right, wrong, good, bad. If our hearts and minds are filled with images of people fitter than us, lives more exciting than ours, and so on, our truth will be extremely distorted and will revolve around (yep...) social media. Not around what is actually true or what is happening in the real world right in front of us. Not that what we see online is always a lie, it just never gives us the full truth. We can not possibly understand the full story of someone's life by checking out their story on Snapchat. That's just not how it works!

Okay, so why are we so stuck on this social media thing? How can we grab our iPhone and not put it down for an entire hour? I think it's the convenience factor that draws us in and keeps us there. The idea that we can change our status, connect with people, discover ideas, and create things in the parameter of our own two hands is incredible. Why should we deal with the risks and worries of real life when we can so easily control our image on social media? We can so easily please ourselves at any time of day or night. I mean... Netflix. It's seriously too good to be true.

But what if it is too good to be true. Like I said, when this world of "likes" and memes becomes our central focus, it becomes our ultimate truth. I think that when it is our truth (or at least contributes to what we know as true) it becomes so much easier to believe what we see and hear on that forum. Thus, society (culture, the government, whomever) can convince us of pretty much whatever they want. We are being conditioned to believe things, such as that people won't like us if we post an ugly picture... And I'm not talking snapchat filter ugly. I mean like a picture of you on your worst day. The day you woke up with a huge pimple on your nose and felt like you couldn't look nice if a professional stylist were there to help you. We just don't post those. We were taught that that's not cool, not impressive, and not worth giving the time of day for. We want to post what puts our life in the most pleasant light. If there were a filter that could make all of pictures look perfect, we would most likely use it. It's just straight up easier (and safer) to make it seem like our lives are all put together because there seems to be some sort of formula for it. This is so similar to Huxley's world in Brave New World. Pleasant feelings and images and emotions are capitalized... Negativity is minimized at all costs. People become slaves to society and lose what makes them an individual. But it is so much easier for the Controllers to control their people when they are created according to a predictable standard. They are taught what to think and believe so that there is very little opportunity or need even for resistance or disagreement among anyone. But these people became simply models of people. Not actual people. Just like our profiles on social media are models of us, not, in a literal sense, us.


For the record, I'm not a snapchat user, so this may be more relevant to the 2013 version of you. And I'm talking primarily about the pictures, videos, etc. that we put out in the open for all of our [followers] to see.