A pinhole camera, also known as a camera obscura, has many uses. It may be used to indirectly view the sun to avoid harming the naked eye, or to help bring a distant object into focus. It is also an apt metaphor for the view we have through social media, not only of the world at large, but of the world of social media itself. By gazing through a pinhole of our own design, we look only at the output of a certain group of trusted friends, at a certain list of preferred blogs, at a certain set of daily news feeds. It is a narrow world of comfort, predictability and familiarity.
Both our self-constrained eyes and the pinhole camera limit our panorama. As Dirk J. Van Den Berg wrote in the online journal Image [&] Narrative,
"This involves the construction of imaginary fixations whose distorting effects are due to their cancer-like growth in the image domain and their relentless dissemination in visual culture. Such ideological fixations are typically images of 'what goes without saying' (Ri coeur 1986, cf Van den Berg 1993) â€" images that empower and disempower, images that conceal and reveal, images that identify and stereotype, images that blind people and that make people see, images that console and images that damn."
As we peer through the tiny pinhole formed by our perceptions, our limitations, and our notions of "what goes without saying," how much of the world's potential to inform and amuse are we overlooking? Does the very nature of social media, its structure, its reliance on friends, and links and connections, doom us forever to see only a 65-degree view of the world?
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