Erased

 When I shared the previous post "I don't even know her name"  with my wife, who was present during the story, she told me that she did not see it that way.

She said that she saw a strong woman who aptly raised a strong family herself and was remembering the finest moments of that life as she saw us with our little one just beginning with him.

As I think about that, I know that every bit of that could also be the case.  I like how the information that we had that night lends itself to either of these ideas. I imagine us sitting with her and asking questions about her life to determine which of these it is.

This is the second time in the recent past that someone has told me that they did not see the events of a time in any way as I did. This brings up an interesting question: Am I weird or is the perspective differential relative to personal context?

Last month I wrote about Poppy Crum and how she has exposed empathic technology.  The tech reads individual naturally occurring signals from us and uses them to offer custom-tailored advertising to us. Could it be that the difference is just that?  More of how we all see the world differently.

I have to now wonder, is tech advertising to us on a personal basis but brainwashing us into idealistic conformity on social media? How many people do we know in which they just share things that fall into the awareness category?  Long heart-wrenching declarations get washed away like watercolor paints when the post ends with the words: "If you feel the same way hold your finger over this post and share to your wall."  I don't know about you, but that just nullifies everything I just read.

When you remove the perspective of the author, it becomes something else.  Last night, well after dark, I drove into the local Walmart parking lot. There were no outside lights on at all.  The Walmart asterisk symbol glowed off the building and you could see the lights inside the entry doors, but otherwise, it was a blackout.  I grabbed my phone to snap a photo, intending to fling it up on social media and ask, who switched Walmart to "dark mode"?  This is what I got.  The camera saw something that I did not and in doing so, also malfunctioned beautifully into this cascade of something simple and composite. No "dark-mode" post for me.

I am hopeful that social media will not erase our individual emotions and perspectives.  If you believe that cannot happen, you are naive.  In the 1960s as televisions became a regular appliance in the homes across America, the very defined local accents of people all over the country started getting watered down.  Later, syndication of the news erased local personalities.  Today, you are being erased. 

Please do not let that happen.  I reference Santa Mira again, from the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  They are coming this way.  Speak for yourself.  Say what you feel, not what someone else packages up and coaxes us into sharing. It makes me sad.