Lossy Compression
We are in this feedback loop, we condense our life into a trite tweet or a ‘pretty’ picture while constantly searching for ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ and ‘followers’. If we post about #Red and it gets more interaction than if we post about #Blue, we’ll end up posting more about #Red, narrowing ourselves down, removing the colour, the variance and the nuance.
We start to just dip into life rather than live it fully. We devote less time in our real life looking at #Pink #Cyan #Orange #Violet etc in order to find content to fill our #Red posts. Always chasing the likes…
Soon, if we’re ‘lucky’, we become ‘The Red Person’ and we befriend other Red People. Pretty soon there’s no way out for us. We feel like we need to keep this whole #Red thing going otherwise Who Are We Now? If we suddenly want to post about #Cyan, all the Red People will get angry.
‘What?! Do you hate Red now??!’
‘No, I don’t hate Red… I just like Cyan, too…?’
‘You can’t like Cyan AND Red!!!!!!’
And so we just keep posting about Red so that we feel like something resembling a person. In fact, we have become like an MP3 with a low bit rate, living ‘lossy’ ‘compressed’ lives, missing out on a huge amount, but trying to give the impression that we are living a full life. If you really pay attention though, you aren’t.
Screengrabs from this test.
