Customizing reality

Dan Biddle, at Thinking Digital 2017, talked about customizing reality.  He is a media strategist and so should know about these things.  

He told us how the latest wave in social media is to augment something that has happened, taking a picture and meddling about with it or taking a video and adding a funny content.  Apparently video gets six times more hits than static pictures.  We are visual creatures.  Perhaps I need to take this on board with my own outpourings.

You can now add gifs and stickers to your content.  You can alter your image and you can put yourself in circumstances that you have never been in.  Check out @TrumpDraws to see what he means.

Lawrence, a good friend of mine wrote that ‘All political leaders work with a future reality’.  It is not just in politics, all leaders do as well.  They project what they would like their organisation to be and focus on the road to getting there.  

What Dan is telling us and what is obvious from the social media market however, is that most of us have this skill.  It is a human talent to be able to imagine a future that does not as yet exist, as if reality ever does.  What is real is only how we perceive it and if we wish to alter it, this is up to us.  Everyone is a rewriter of history.  Everyone is a manipulator of reality.  All of us create our lives in our own image.  Our reality is entirely our own construct.

The latest wave in social media therefore is not customizing reality but rather having access to the tools that allow us to alter how we see things.  We can project ourselves as we would like to be rather than how others may perceive us.

Is this a bad thing?  Are we deluding ourselves?  I don’t think so.  Social media is just as real as any other medium and so this latest approach is just us projecting a new hyper-reality.