| Shall Be Shallow
Social networking websites have made me realize a clear and
present truth. People have forgotten
that they are beautiful. Profile
pictures spew of the superficial—there is no sincerity in them. These pictures are black-and-white-ed, lens
flared, oblique angled, pictures of random non-relations—or they are
statements.
There is no more confidence in the candid. The graduation picture, the semi-formal
picture, the party picture—they are all slices of a person, they are fake
impressions forced out into a photo. We
all succumb to the paralyzing grip of our peers’ judgments.
The personal information, interests, and indicated
preferences in whatever—they’ve also cued me into my realization. For certain, it seems that showcasing this
information is a way to hedge against rejection. It used to be that a conversation would run
its course, and one of the people talking would roll the dice, sporadically
choose music as a topic and throw out the name of a band they liked. At this point, either the two would be drawn
closer by means of some kind of connection, or further away due to a disparity
in taste.
And it’s cliché but true:
no risk, no reward. Social
networking sites allow us to shotgun our preferences to all of the hundreds of
“friends” we have. We have become too
afraid to face the one-on-one rejection, so we consider the hundred person
acceptance as an acceptable alternative.
We have lost faith in ourselves. Instead of approaching others with a sincere
portrait of our thoughts and values, we give a mass what we think they
want. And when you have everyone (or at
least, nearly everyone) doing this at the same time, you find yourself in a
community, too shallow, too depraved, and too misleading to ever have meaning
or to ever see meaning in themselves. And
so the problem presents itself: when you
forget that you are beautiful in such a way, you cease to be it.
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