Woman 'finds herself' in South-east Asia with a little help from Photoshop to satirise Facebook brag

[randomness]

I'm really amused by this.

The dead giveaway for me would be be the drip feed of images and updates. When I'm actually on the road, I'm usually too busy doing stuff to post a damn thing, which is how I manage to take thousands of photos and videos and not post any of them.

From http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/woman-finds-herself-in-southeast-asia-with-a-little-help-from-photoshop-to-satirise-facebook-bragging-9726396.html:

Dutch student Zilla van den Born put Photoshop to heroic use by inserting herself into images of stunning beaches and scenes of Buddhist monks and uploading them to Facebook to highlight how "we create an ideal world online which reality can no longer meet".

The 25-year-old appeared to her friends to be enjoying a five-week holiday in South-east Asia, when in fact she was sat at home in Amsterdam the entire time.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I'm amused by it, but continuing to be appalled at the sense I get that many people are judging themselves by what they see on FB, convinced everyone else is having a better life than they are and that they are helpless to make their own lives better.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

A while back one of my friends said something to the effect that LiveJournal was where people posted their personal press releases. I'm sure that he'd have said that about Facebook if it had been part of our lives at the time.

I don't think it's always the case, but I do keep in mind that everyone filters what they post. That's not necessarily out of a conscious desire to deceive--certainly those people exist--but because it's simply impossible to post everything that happens in life, and tedious as well.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I guess one of the tricks is having friends with a significant degree of self-awareness and authenticity. My sense is that many of my friends are doing cool things and struggling with other parts of their lives.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The way I look at it, most everyone is struggling with something. That they don't post about their struggles doesn't necessarily mean they doesn't exist, or that they're trying to hide them. They may be too busy working on them to post, or they may feel they don't want to share those particular struggles.

My friends, like everyone else, exist on a spectrum of self-awareness and a spectrum of authenticity. Some of them are working on those things, too. That's pretty much okay with me, as long as I can assume good will. I'd have a lot fewer friends if I didn't think some lack of self-awareness and some inauthenticity wasn't okay. :)

Most everyone is doing something cool, I think.