Ramblings About Identity Crisis and Realism

It has been a busy week at work.  I am behind in my postings both here and on American Catholic - I do hope my readers will overlook the brief absence.  Even this post, it seems, is the result of tired ramblings.  Thus, if cohesion and coherence are lost, I beg your forgiveness.

My family just sat for a photograph to be included in a parish "Photo Directory."  Of course, the company offers the sitting for free in the hopes that you will purchase something other than the complimentary directory.  Alas, we are frgual these days and had no intention of spending addition money.  However, the very nice gentleman who was promoting the glamorous package of photographs was also pushing a "professional retouching service" whereby they apply "very subtle" modifications to "smooth out lines" and "soften features."  There were several examples of such retouching available for our perusal.

It struck me as he was talking that, while the retouched photographs did look nicer, they weren't real.  Of course, I suppose there is not much difference between a photograph retouching and the application of makeup, but then again, I have already admitted a lack of cohesion and coherence, so I am free at this point to conveniently ignore that fact.

Our culture seems to be progressing further and further away from realism, at least when it comes to portraying the self.  We want to look "our best" even is "our best" isn't actually "us."  People retouch photos, bloggers adopt online "identities", singers have their voices "auto-tuned."  All of this at the service of projecting a better self.  But it makes one wonder if such a lack of realism is in fact dangerous for us and our concept of the human person and interpersonal relationships.  Surely this is connected in some form or another to the Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging phenomena.  It got me thinking ... how much can you "re-touch" a photograph (or auto-tune a voice, or digress from one's "normal" personality while online) before the re-touched version simply "isn't you" anymore.

Of course, I can't help but taking this a step further.  A bright friend once reminded me that even a non-re-touched photograph isn't really the person, but rather a static, contextless representation of an individual.  Likewise, a video of someone, even if it is live, is not really that person, but the reassembled zeros and ones that serve as a digitization of the individual.  Even a phone conversation is not really "with" the other person, but rather with a reassembled, transported version of their voice.  The only thing that "is" the person is the person himself, and the only contact that is "real" contact is that which involves the actual body of the person.  If we don't see that, we will come to mistake the copy for the person and come to mistake "Facebook friends" for real relationships.

While this is already random, I might as well mentioned that this all lends a helpful explanation for why confession must be in person, even if behind a screen.  Physical proximity is necessary for embodied beings to be in actual relationship.

It seems to me that the world is in need of a healthy dose of realism.  In effect, we are, as a society, experiencing an identity crisis.  We are losing ourselves and our relationships and replacing them with digital, "re-touched" counterfeits.

That is quote enough for one day, and I do hope that tomorrow I don't look back and regret the incoherence.  If so, perhaps I can retouch what I wrote.