Instagram filters: this is how they distort perception

Instagram filter
So they distort the perception

© Eugenio Marongiu / Shutterstock

The supposed reality in digital space has exactly one beautiful side – the one it shows. And our colleague cannot win anything.

Nikola Helmreich

It's slowly seeping into my brain: I no longer understand the world. And by that I don't even mean the world of last year. But the small, everyday world. That which was once private – and is now shown to as many viewers as possible, excuse me: followers.

What is perfect is rewarded. And what is natural is never perfect.

Instagram is one of the most popular locations with over a billion active users worldwide. In addition to the principle of fast image exchange, it has produced something else: filters. People who like to tinker with themselves and their lives, in real life and digitally, feel at home there. Because everyone can produce and optimize themselves to their own taste. Filter over it, the good life is ready. Quite simply, from the sofa, without even having to get your ass up. But even those who move their butts and document their daily workout in minute detail, i.e. who actively optimize themselves, use the filters on top of that.

Optimized twice lasts better.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against Instagram at all. But as is so often the case, the system suffers from the people who use it. Countless posts prove, for example, that photos of optimized bodies generate twice to three times as many likes compared to the (very beautiful!) Originals. Because what is perfect is rewarded. And what is natural is never perfect.

In the past few years I had to justify myself again and again for walking around the world without make-up, and kept hearing sentences like: But when you go out, do you already put your eyelashes on? A little mascara would look good on you! As in many other areas, we have actually moved one step forward and two back in terms of optical perception. So today I have to justify showing my bare face unfiltered – scandal! According to the motto: If you're already walking around without make-up, at least put a digital filter over it. See above: I no longer understand the world.

Anyone who is not on Instagram is also considered to be retrograde, a digital refuser. Nothing is further from my mind: quick networking, finding ways, people, recipes, stories, thoughts, inspiration – everything is great. The quick beautification: catastrophic. And even a fallacy, because it doesn't happen that quickly.

By the time the right photo was taken and the perfect filter selected, I would have used the only real filter a long time ago – and served myself coffee.

In October the digital mother ship of the optical staging turned ten years old. Congratulations and thank you for a decade that has brought distorted perceptions of reality into more than a billion lives. My suggestion for the next ten: In addition to the likes, please also remove the filters. Or at least call the child by name. Because: There are no filters. Filters, as my coffee filter proves every day, are there to let something through. Or to make something soiled clean and usable again. They always leave visible what they have filtered out. The fine photo filters are different. They just hide what actually is. And are in cahoots with cosmetic surgery: there is no more before.

Nobody sees how it used to be. Everyone just sees how it is now. The increasing number of "Reality versus Instagram" posts are of no use either. And so the filtered world became a reality. So what is placed on all the photos in this world are not filters, but masks. Perhaps this simple exchange of words creates a new consciousness that slowly seeps into the mind.

BARBARA 51/2020