Suppose:
I took photos with an awesome DSLR of only cowdung in a place,
And sent you a collection of 150 such photos,
What would you think?
That the whole place is nothing but a pile of shit?
But the reality of that is, all the dung was spread quite a bit.
Each picture might have looked larger than life on your HD screen,
But the actual place was completely different,
A neutral normal ordinary place with everyone going about their usual business.
Now let’s take the opposite case:
The opposite phenomenon may happen in a place like Instagram.
When celebrities etc. take photos of places from strategic spots,
Wearing exotic dresses, and add magical filter effects,
All this would make the place itself look like a dream fantasy.
Based on watching all these exotic posts of such places,
I’m sure many might have traveled with their family with the hope of getting some taste of that same magic.
And maybe what they found was that the places fell far short of their expectation?
Maybe they were just usual ordinary places with everyone doing their usual stuff?
The kind of information pouring into our HD digital screens,
Can seriously warp our perception about everything.
It is of course not only pictures but also narratives of different events that hugely shape our perception and experience.
A very interesting story I read a while ago was about this very perceptual distortion.
The story is titled: The island news network, I think.
The story goes like this:
In a group of 100 islands, each island had its own news station.
Whenever there was a shark attack, which would happen once in 2 years in one of the islands, that would get reported in that island-specific news channel.
Then later they unified all of the islands and created a single news channel.
Now the news of the shark attack started showing up in the citizen’s HD screens every 2 weeks.
It was so frequent, and shown in such detail, that everyone in all the islands entirely stopped swimming.
So the amount of information in the world is infinite.
We have to be aware of the balance of our perspective and be conscious about this kind of warping and distortion that can so easily happen, considering how we have abundant access to audio/video/writings in today’s INFORMATION AGE.
I took photos with an awesome DSLR of only cowdung in a place,
And sent you a collection of 150 such photos,
What would you think?
That the whole place is nothing but a pile of shit?
But the reality of that is, all the dung was spread quite a bit.
Each picture might have looked larger than life on your HD screen,
But the actual place was completely different,
A neutral normal ordinary place with everyone going about their usual business.
Now let’s take the opposite case:
The opposite phenomenon may happen in a place like Instagram.
When celebrities etc. take photos of places from strategic spots,
Wearing exotic dresses, and add magical filter effects,
All this would make the place itself look like a dream fantasy.
Based on watching all these exotic posts of such places,
I’m sure many might have traveled with their family with the hope of getting some taste of that same magic.
And maybe what they found was that the places fell far short of their expectation?
Maybe they were just usual ordinary places with everyone doing their usual stuff?
The kind of information pouring into our HD digital screens,
Can seriously warp our perception about everything.
It is of course not only pictures but also narratives of different events that hugely shape our perception and experience.
A very interesting story I read a while ago was about this very perceptual distortion.
The story is titled: The island news network, I think.
The story goes like this:
In a group of 100 islands, each island had its own news station.
Whenever there was a shark attack, which would happen once in 2 years in one of the islands, that would get reported in that island-specific news channel.
Then later they unified all of the islands and created a single news channel.
Now the news of the shark attack started showing up in the citizen’s HD screens every 2 weeks.
It was so frequent, and shown in such detail, that everyone in all the islands entirely stopped swimming.
So the amount of information in the world is infinite.
We have to be aware of the balance of our perspective and be conscious about this kind of warping and distortion that can so easily happen, considering how we have abundant access to audio/video/writings in today’s INFORMATION AGE.
Journey to the Abstract 