Facebook and Photos

I came across a blog post recently, entitled "I'm Not a Liar, but Facebook sure is." The authors point in the post is that, while the series of happy photos she posted to Facebook seem to indicate all is well in her world, in reality, what's happening in the background is far less sanguine, such as her husband being out of town on work, or the adoption that she and her husband hoped for would take longer than they initially thought. She calls Facebook a liar because "you and I put up our very best moments on social media to show our friends, family, and acquaintances, it paints a picture about our lives that just isn’t true."

I beg to differ.

This is not about whether Facebook lies, or whether photographs lie, or what have you. Rather, this is about completeness and complexity. Whether on Facebook or in one's hand or on Instagram or in one's phone, a photograph (and even a movie) can only show a snapshot of time. That is their purpose - to show the smiles, or the happy moment, or the wedding cake, or even the frowns and fights. The moment they show is that of the shutter speed of a camera - perhaps 16 milliseconds or even less time. They can show the fantastic kick in soccer, a moment of grace, beauty and fluidity...that seconds later was blocked, resulting in that kicker's team losing. They can show the beauty of a wedding cake shared between two couples, who will later experience miscarriage, loss of jobs, financial ruin, happy grandchildren, a long life together, or sudden death.

I wonder sometimes if, in our modern life, we place so much importance on photographs, videos, etc., because we no longer invest the time in interpersonal (and intergeological) communications - of sitting at dinner with family and neighbors, of gardening, of letter writing and extensive phone calls. So, therefore, the Facebook update, the Instagram, and the Tweet become our most critical method of gleaning information about others. And all of these methods are limited to a moment in time, limited by the necessarily short and "sweet" posts that our harried lives permit us to broadcast. So we are tempted to consider those as the whole of another's life - we wish to think we know other people, so we create our image of those Facebook friends from their posts and photos.

So, we take these momentary pictures, image and words, as the whole of another's life. We must remember, however, that the pictures are simultaneously true and incomplete. They are moments of the present, showing only the present - only we can infuse them with the idea that they represent more than that moment, or that the image we see stands for more than it does. So...they cannot lie, so to speak, but nor can they speak the whole truth of a life.