Snapshots on Facebook can capture the exact moment of any emotion in a person’s life. Cameras have been doing this for decades, but it just took longer to see what the moment looked like considering the film had to be developed. Then the Polaroid Land camera was invented by Edwin H. Land in 1947. Now, today’s technology allows us to view that instant of time in seconds.
Gillian Tindall, the British writer and historian, “(was) always driven by a curiosity about happenstance . . . ,” writes Christiana Hardyment in her book review of Tindall’s memoir, “The Pulse Glass: And the beat of other hearts.” (275 pp. Chatto and Windus).
Of course, my essays concentrate on cigars, and how they relate to today’s culture and happenstance is a major notion in my work and is the one word that drew me to write this post. To be exact, “happenstance” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as “a coincidence.”
Hardyment goes on to write by quoting one of Tindall’s characters from her book “The Historical Novel” (1924), “‘The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments . . . All history is full of locked doors, and of faint glimpses of things that cannot be reached.’” In other words, the seconds of fame or exposure begot via social media are shorter than even the famed paraphrased quote from the artist, Andy Warhol, that everyone is allowed his or her fifteen minutes of fame. In this case, it’s more like a millisecond.
In short, these shards on social media of emotional times depict a rainbow of periods in an individual’s life and seems to show the world the truth about them – all smiles, few frowns, lasting love, hazy hate, false fear thus showing the universe how he or she feels – always. Or in short, his or her reality.
But life isn’t like that, is it? Smiles turn into grimaces, frowns morph into scowls, tears run dry, love turns into misunderstanding, and hate rachets into anger. So one could say once the photo is released on Facebook, Instagram, or any other form of social (perhaps an anomaly in itself) media, it remains in the cloud of hyperspace delusion for eternity (admit it or not the photo as remains there forever).
What isn’t seen in the photos is the reality before or after the published emotion, scenario, or staged story. Reality is an integral component of that split second smile, the glad handshake, or incredible incident. Reality, as defined in the Oxford dictionary, is “The world or state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic idea (sic) of them,” Methinks this is the resultant attraction/addiction to social media where an individual can spin the truth (photo) in any direction he or she thinks will be beneficial.
No matter what we see on social media, we are never allowed to be exposed to go beyond that point of sheer happiness, the fantastic cigar event, or a warm embrace of a chilly friendship. We are viewing the photo as a fragment of what may be and we naturally absorb that bit as the reality of his or her life that has been captured in cyberspace in ad infinitum.
Indeed, any form of social media is a mainstay of our chaotic culture. It allows us, the viewer, to live in a world of dank delusion. And if a person is addicted to scrolling, as so many of us may be, we are literally blurring and essentially burying reality. We are, as a result, seeking a dream that will never ever be achieved unless we, like Alice, walk through the screen into a concatenation of the fetish of fantasy seeking a world that will never be real (perhaps the heart’s desire) if we continue to scroll down the social media highway mesmerized by a dim blue light.
IrvCigarBroker 