Here is a first sneak peek at an interview I conducted with photographer Sara Melotti in Como, Italy. We spoke over the course of two days about social media, performative behavior, comparison anxiety, and other issues related to visual platforms like Instagram.I’ve got almost two hours of interview material which is really incisive and thought-provoking. Here are some of my favorite interview bits, edited for you. I hope you’ll enjoy this first sneak peek at The Realists; I feel like this argument comes full circle with what Jean Kilbourne had to say in The Illusionists. Enjoy!
– Elena
The full transcript:
Social media are designed to make you addicted and keep you addicted. So if you enter and maybe you want to just check your messages and get out, you can’t, because even just seeing those red notifications aren’t open, it gives you anxiety so you will start checking all your various notifications and going from app to app and there’s always something that keeps you there and also the images that are used on these platforms are images created to basically make you feel bad about yourself.
Now we are dealing with… unrealistic life standards. So if you’re scrolling down your feed and you keep seeing perfect picture of perfect life, after perfect picture of perfect life […] you automatically start thinking like “whoa my life is not perfect, I’m not perfect, I suck.”
I’m a positive person and I want to believe the world can get better instead of keep getting worse. So I believe there are solutions to this problem. The first solution would be to spend a lot less time online and reconnect to who we are and to the people around us and the world around us… spend more time in nature and with the people we love and less time online.
And maybe the most important thing and most effective thing is to create awareness about what’s going on and make people aware that it’s all fake and it’s all just marketing strategies to keep you addicted to these platforms and to make you buy things. It’s all about making you a perfect consumer, they are treating you as a consumer and not as a person.
