25 thoughts on “Filtered Reality”

1. 
   » Ap­pa­ra­tus The­ory chart by Gre­gory L. Ul­mer
    
   

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2. 
   » Quotes from Chap­ter 1

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3. 
   » Quotes doc from Ret­tberg Chap­ter 2

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4. 
   » Quotes from Chap­ter 5

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5. 
   » W 30-Mar hy­brid work Dis­cus­sion :

   
   1. Com­ment: (due 12:15pm; 2–3 sen­tences)
   Use a quote from Chap­ter 2 to dis­cuss me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ence in terms of one “fil­ter” cat­e­gory —
   with an ex­am­ple of your own, from per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence and/or ob­ser­va­tions.
   Con­nect this fil­ter cat­e­gory to an idea from chap­ter one — one of the “modes of self-representation” (vi­sual, writ­ten, quantitative/data, cu­rated) — to dis­cuss the me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ence of iden­tity (along with any con­se­quent ideas, like public/private? visible/invisible?)
   Be sure to keep in mind Rettberg’s key in­tro­duc­tory point: “Fil­ters can be tech­no­log­i­cal, cul­tural or cog­ni­tive, or they can be a com­bi­na­tion of these” (p.20).
    

   2. Class­mate Re­ply (due 12:45pm; ~2 sen­tences):
   Ex­tend your classmate’s dis­cus­sion by con­nect­ing to your ini­tial point and/or a dif­fer­ent ex­am­ple (from ex­pe­ri­ence or ob­ser­va­tions). How does the fil­ter cat­e­gory or con­cept re­late to the mode of self-representation? What new un­der­stand­ing or insight/s do you rec­og­nize, con­sid­er­ing a fa­mil­iar topic (me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ence) this way?
   (for in­stance, “aes­theti­ciz­ing” or “de­fa­mil­iar­iz­ing” every­day life or iden­tity ex­pres­sion)
    

   *op­tion: re­ply to an ad­di­tional com­ment for bonus par­tic­i­pa­tion credit
    

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   1. “the tech­no­log­i­cal fil­ters we ap­ply to our blogs and other so­cial me­dia feeds and the cul­tural fil­ters (norms, ex­pec­ta­tions, nor­ma­tive dis­cur­sive strate­gies) that teach us, for in­stance, to mimic photo mod­els in fash­ion mag­a­zines or In­sta­gram selfie stars when we photo-graph our­selves.”

      Much like a fil­ter is used me­chan­i­cally to strain out that which we want and ex­clude that which we don’t, a fil­ter for a form of so­cial iden­tity like in­sta­gram, twit­ter, or face­book helps us de­ter­mine who we are and re­flects our state of mind. On snapchat, the fil­ters are in­tended for hu­mor, grow­ing or shrink­ing faces and adding silly an­i­mal­is­tic at­trib­utes to in­di­vid­u­als geared to­ward hu­mor. Light­heart­ed­ness is the heart of snapchat and is rep­re­sented as such with their lit­tle ghost logo and the pro­cliv­ity of users to send hu­mor­ous anec­dotes or en­ter­tain­ing videos to doc­u­ment their ac­tiv­i­ties, re­flect­ing their happy sta­tus and en­cour­ag­ing cheer for both them­selves and their tar­get au­di­ence.

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      1. I like what you said about how light­head­ed­ness is rep­re­sented through the fil­ters pro­vided and ghost logo of snapchat. I think this can be even fur­ther an­a­lyzed as how com­mu­ni­ca­tion has nec­es­sar­ily evolved to al­low our im­per­sonal con­nec­tions through tech­nol­ogy to be prop­erly in­ter­preted by ap­ply­ing fil­ters. When com­mu­ni­cat­ing in per­son, much more than the words be­ing spo­ken go into un­der­stand­ing what the other per­son is con­vey­ing. Body lan­guage, voice in­flec­tions, tone, and speed can make two iden­ti­cal sen­tences come across very dif­fer­ently. Emoti­cons in tex­ting is a per­fect ex­am­ple of this, al­low­ing a user to send a pic­ture rep­re­sent­ing the emo­tion with which the words should be in­ter­preted. Fil­ters have al­lowed us to add emo­tion and ideas where it was pre­vi­ously not pos­si­ble.

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         1. **light­heart­ed­ness

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6. “We can chance, clean, adapt, re­sist, or re­move fil­ters, but most of the time we sim­ply take them for granted, not even notic­ing that they were there”–I feel as if I can re­late this con­cept to the idea of how we meet peo­ple and how we are in­tro­duced to peo­ple.
   We may meet some­one through some sort of so­cial me­dia but that per­son is dif­fer­ent than the one we meet in per­son. Al­though this can re­fer to the lit­eral use of fil­ters, or even a fig­u­ra­tive façade that is pre­sented, we are un­able to see who the real per­son is through every me­dia out­let.
   This can re­late to the con­cept in chap­ter one of “as read­ers, we en­counter other peo­ple in so­cial me­dia as texts” be­cause like I said be­fore, we are un­able to see peo­ple as who they are, through their raw-ness and in turn, every photo that we see and even every post that we see through the me­dia is al­tered in a way where a façade is placed over every­thing to the point where every­thing is pre­sented as text or fic­tion, rather than re­al­ity.
   As far as re­it­er­at­ing Rettberg’s key point, I be­lieve that fil­ters are mainly cul­tural, as in today’s so­ci­ety, every­one is af­fected by them, and this in turn shapes our per­ceived re­al­ity and ul­ti­mately al­ter­ing our cul­ture

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   1. I agree to how fil­ters can be moved by cul­ture, but I think an­other part of what makes this state­ment true is from the so­cial pres­sures cre­ated within our so­ci­ety that greatly shapes each gen­er­a­tions per­cep­tion and in­tu­ition to the re­al­ity they need to achieve. Also, I think that the ex­am­ple you gave above is sim­i­lar to the con­cept of self-representation and cu­ra­tion from chap­ter of how peo­ple want to be viewed by oth­ers and what they need to strive to be seen…

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   2. So­cial me­dia rep­re­sents the ul­ti­mate form of vic­ar­i­ous liv­ing nowa­days. Fil­ters only add to the façade that we cre­ate in the fic­ti­tious realms of Face­book, Twit­ter, In­sta­gram, and all of the oth­ers. How­ever, many peo­ple seem to be held cap­tive by the per­ceived sense of ne­ces­sity in post­ing every lit­tle de­tail of their ac­tual daily lives. What I have been say­ing for years is this: We have be­come so con­nected that we are dis­con­nected. I agree with you that these fil­ters are mainly cul­tural in that they di­rectly re­flect the ex­pec­ta­tions and views of the lat­est, hippest, trendi­est crap we feel is in­ter­est­ing for the next 3.5 hours.

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   3. I agree with your com­ment. Be­cause of so­cial me­dia, peo­ple are able to choose and fil­ter them­selves what they want oth­ers to see and not see within their lives.

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   4. I feel that fil­ters them­selves, at least with re­spect to tech­no­log­i­cal fil­ters, are not con­strained to a cul­ture but rather in­ter­preted dif­fer­ently from cul­ture to cul­ture where they are used. It is true that there is no man­ner in which to fully un­der­stand whom an in­di­vid­ual is, but the mask or fil­ter that they wear is go­ing to be cho­sen on a cul­tural ba­sis with a given cul­ture as a tar­get, whereas in­di­vid­u­als ob­serv­ing the fil­ter from a dif­fer­ent cul­ture will draw a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion as to the state and vari­ant of the in­di­vid­ual in ques­tion.

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7. While read­ing chap­ter two I came across the quote “Twit­ter fil­ters out long form writ­ing, re­quir­ing us to limit our­selves to 140 char­ac­ters.” This state­ment is a great ex­am­ple of how the in­ter­net is able to ma­nip­u­late the pub­lic to be pre­cise and to the point about what they are try­ing to say. I be­lieve this re­lates back to chap­ter one be­cause with only 140 char­ac­ters avail­able for us, we must care­fully choose the word­ing and way in which we want the pub­lic eye to view us. Twit­ter en­cour­ages us to stray away from the tra­di­tional blog or jour­nal­ing of our lives and trans­form it into a short para­graph or even a few sen­tences to up­date and in­form our fam­ily and friends. Be­cause our space is lim­ited, we must say what we want, whether good or bad, and get to the point rather than pro­vid­ing bor­ing and some­times dis­tract­ing ex­pla­na­tion.

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   1. The ini­tial quote I chose is sim­i­lar to yours about writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion and fil­ters. I think words like con­cise or spe­cific are in­di­ca­tions of fil­ters ap­plied to writ­ten thought.

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   2. I find it very in­ter­est­ing how things like twit­ter and maybe Face­book (I’m not sure if theres a limit) can limit what we have to say, mak­ing sure we are very spe­cific in what we’d like to say. I have to ask the ques­tion if is it nec­es­sar­ily a good thing or a bad thing–I un­der­stand in which you have to be straight to the point, but what about if what you’re try­ing to say needs an ex­pla­na­tion?

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   3. I agree with what you said about the fact that our space is lim­ited be­ing a ben­e­fit be­cause it forces us to get to the point. I would also like to point out how that might be harm­ful. It can cause po­lar­iz­abil­ity of many sub­jects, mak­ing us choose to be on one side of the point or an­other. Of­ten times the grey area, ex­pla­na­tion, and in­tent be­hind state­ments are detri­men­tal to ac­cu­rately con­vey­ing feel­ings or opin­ions.

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8. “Feel­ing mis­rep­re­sented by the cam­era is one com­mon rea­son for be­gin­ning to take self­ies in­stead of be­ing the sub­ject of other people’s pho­tographs.” I like this ex­am­ple of cog­ni­tive fil­ter be­cause as a per­fec­tion­ist. I of­ten feel that if every de­tail of any pic­tures I take, es­pe­cially my self­ies, then I am in­ter­nally obliged to re­take the pic­ture over and over again, us­ing the per­fect an­gle and all to achieve the best rep­re­sen­ta­tion of some­thing I want other peo­ple to see me as. This same ex­am­ple is very sim­i­lar to the idea of cu­ra­tion, where cu­ra­tion is a rep­re­sen­tion of our iden­tity based on our records, self­ies or blogs. Both cog­ni­tive fil­ter and cu­ra­tion shows an an­a­lyza­tion of how an iden­tity is based of a person’s fan­tasy of what per­fec­tion is within their own eyes and how they want other peo­ple to see them by. The crit­i­cal part about an­a­lyz­ing cog­ni­tive fil­ter and cu­ra­tion is both of these meth­ods do not clearly show the grey ar­eas within a person’s true iden­tity. What I mean by this is that a per­fect fil­ter may hide every im­per­fec­tion of a person’s phys­i­cal ap­pear­ance and flaw to every bad pic­ture, but it does not show the emo­tional prob­lems and is­sues as­so­ci­ated with the fil­ter. The per­fect fil­ters pic­ture does not rec­og­nize the emo­tional at­tach­ment of people’s feel­ings about be­ing ad­dicted to show some­thing they are not or some­thing that they fan­ta­size as some­one to be flaw­less. Cog­ni­tive fil­ter through cu­ra­tion does not show the clear mean­ing, vi­sions and emo­tions peo­ple truly have…

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   1. I think it is very in­ter­est­ing what you said about self­ies. Be­cause we are in con­trol of the cam­era, we de­cide what is con­sid­ered good and bad. And when it comes to our­selves we can be­come very crit­i­cal and very de­tail ori­ented when in re­al­ity, the peo­ple who may see these pho­tos are not. Cu­ra­tion is a very spe­cific type of fil­ter we in­still within our­selves and some­times judge our­selves harder than oth­ers would.

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9. ” Lan­guage can cer­tainly be un­der­stood as a tech­nol­ogy, and it is an­other of the fil­ters that sur­round us.
   This quote ex­presses lan­guage as a de­vise cre­ated to make com­mu­ni­ca­tion more ef­fec­tive. We can use lan­guage as a fil­ter by omit­ting spe­cific words, com­bin­ing and se­quenc­ing words, in or­der to give mean­ing and di­rec­tion to thought. Our thought is fil­tered through lan­guage every day, it is com­mon to hear ” think be­fore you speak”. Lan­guage is most in­ter­est­ing to me when it is trans­lated into vi­sual self rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The per­sonal trans­for­ma­tion from au­di­ble to vi­sual (like vi­su­al­iz­ing a book in your head) al­lows for great artis­tic ex­pres­sion. Only the au­thor of a book vi­su­al­izes the true story, and when the book is adapted to film fil­ters are ap­plied. Some book film adap­ta­tions are aw­ful, and oth­ers are great, it is all de­pen­dent to the fil­ters ap­plied to the words. Fil­ters for am­biance, at­mos­phere, and ex­pres­sion of mean­ing in a vi­sual sit­u­a­tional or­der of words.

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   1. I re­ally like your ex­am­ple of how lan­guage is fil­tered to show how var­i­ous per­spec­tive are shown to dis­play how com­mu­ni­ca­tion can be im­prove for other peo­ple to see and un­der­stand. The ex­am­ple you gave above from how an au­thor of a book as a spe­cific vi­sion of his/her story is al­tered and re­vised from other peo­ple such ass the ed­i­tors and publishers.This re­minds of the Feed­back mech­a­nism of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­ory where the grey ar­eas of this spe­cific the­ory is shown by what peo­ple know or have ex­pe­ri­ence from their own per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences that vary from an­other person’s thoughts, knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ences.

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   2. This is an ex­tremely in­ter­st­ing look at lan­guage, and it re­ally makes you think just how much power the au­thor has, how much artis­tic di­rec­tion needed and how much en­ergy and time it takes to make that un­der­stood by the au­di­ence.

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10. ” We don’t just fil­ter our im­ages be­fore we post them to In­sta­gram, though: fil­ter has be­come an im­por­tant and far more gen­eral con­cept in today’s dig­i­tal cul­ture. We fil­ter our im­ages, our email and our news­feeds.”
    This quote jumped out at me as in­cred­i­ble in­ter­est­ing for mul­ti­ple rea­sons. The idea of face comes up in the field of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and it re­lates to how we want oth­ers to see us, how we present our­selves in a way. This idea goes even fur­ther to our so­cial me­dia age when it comes to what we want to see on web­sites such as face­book, and twit­ter. We even fil­ter our in­ter­net in a cer­tain way, all the cook­ies and pre­vi­ous web­sites you visit train your com­puter and teach it what to ad­ver­tise to grab your at­ten­tion, what is news­wor­thy to you. We see this on ama­zon when we get there, the web­site is al­ready try­ing to sell you items you have pre­vi­ously looked at, or when your face­book news feed shows the most trend­ing news is the news re­lated to your sports team even if said news isn’t even that im­por­tant or in­ter­est­ing. Fil­ters are all over our lives whether we see it or not.

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11. Ret­tberg dis­cussed the du­al­ity of how our cur­rent no­tion of fil­ter­ing (sub­ject de­pen­dent) usu­ally a process which re­moves un­wanted con­tent in some way, of­ten al­go­rith­mi­cally, but the re­sult is pre­ceived as adding to what­ever form of con­tent be­ing viewed. I find this in­ter­est­ing be­cause that im­plies that we have reached a time in life where build­ing our re­al­i­ties to fit our de­sires is not only a pos­si­bil­ity, but a daily oc­curence. Even more so, we might not even re­al­ize how much we have al­ready done that.

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12. “Cul­tural fil­ters change over time and are dif­fer­ent in dif­fer­ent cul­tures. We can and of­ten do re­sist or change cul­tural fil­ters”
    This quote shows how cul­tural fil­ters are af­fected by lan­guage, cli­mate, wealth, re­li­gion, pop­u­la­tion, and time which shows how we as peo­ple re­act to stim­uli blindly to form a lifestyle. I lived in Ecuador for 6 months when I was in the 6^th grade and vis­ited many in­dige­nous vil­lages where they did not have nearly the re­sources that we en­joy and do not com­mu­ni­cate with the lo­cal Ecuado­ri­ans, this lifestyle is dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent than ours based off how they log­i­cally re­act to the fil­ters in their en­vi­ron­ment.
    “So­cial me­dia is about com­mu­ni­ca­tion with oth­ers, but we should be equally aware of how we use so­cial me­dia to re­flect upon our­selves.”
    West­ern so­ci­ety has ac­cepted so­cial me­dia as a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which in turn changes our cul­ture and how peo­ple eval­u­ate their lives. Ever since we are kids we try to mimic those around us to fit in, so when so­cial me­dia has got­ten as big as it is now we seem­ingly have no choice but to go along with so­ci­ety.

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