Chapter 14 Reading Response

                The part of this chapter that I really enjoyed was the article written by Lenore Skenazy. I thought that it was an interesting article because it brought about the thought of something that I had never really thought about before but experience all of the time. That is how everyone only takes pictures of the good things in their lives. They only take pictures of things that they find leave a good image of themselves or the people that they are close to. Although I definitely do this whenever I post a picture on Facebook or just keep pictures saved on my phone or camera, I have never actually thought about doing this. I liked this article because it made this noticeable for the first time. It made me think about how everyone does it. Whether it is deleting pictures that they think are bad, or editing pictures of themselves to give themselves a better image. I think it might be because people are all somewhat self-conscious; some more than others, about the way people will view them. Facebook has become a large part of how we get to know people. If you don’t know who someone is, the first instinct is often times to creep on them on Facebook and get to know a little bit about them before you actually meet them. Since a vast majority of people base their opinions on the pictures on Facebook, everyone wants to have the best looking pictures that show them happy all the time or dressed nicely. Not many people put random pictures of themselves sitting on the couch or showing sadness or anger. I had never thought about this very much because it was always just the way things were. I always just accepted it as the way people presented themselves. It makes sense that nobody would want to be portrayed in a negative light on something like Facebook or in family albums where an endless amount of people would be able to see the pictures and would most likely make their initial opinions based on those few pictures. Posting and recording pictures actually make people’s lives look much more interesting than they very are. Skenazy’s example of the picture of the 30 inch bass that someone caught makes their lives look much more interesting. Pictures of people on vacation and doing exciting things make it seem as though they have extremely interesting and exhilarating lives. However, if the entire life of someone was recorded, only a small fraction of their lives would be of them doing exciting things and much more of it would be of them doing typical things like sleeping or eating or working. I think that calling the perfect family a myth is very fitting for this topic. Photography makes life seem so much more interesting than it actually is and it makes people seem much more perfect than they actually are. Whether this is good or not, it is definitely dominant in our society today.