Why are we making photographs nostalgic before they have even had the time to become nostalgic?

Instagram and other similar applications are getting on my tits a bit now. A photograph by its very nature is something of the past. As soon as the photograph is taken it is a history, so what i don't understand is why so many people will add filters to photographs in an attempt to make them look like something from yester-year. The photograph will one day be nostalgic, give it time. The instagram filters are a way of trying to add a sense of spontaneity and element of chance to a photograph, much like 'hipsters' using shit lomo cameras to get 'cool' colours and fringing and terrible resolution. (It annoys me how that for the same money people pay for all this lomography stuff, people could be taking beautiful photographs with vintage film cameras with sharp optics and heavy duty build quality...but oh well.) Instagram basically imitates the characteristics of film. By adding a filter after taking the photograph to make it look like it was shot on film, therefore removing any spontaneity and chance factor involved - and even then, the filters are based on rigid mathematical code in software, not the true chaos of chemical reactions based on light and temperature that creates chance elements in film. To me the instagram photograph is generally typified by a photograph of a drink which is an appendage to a shit status about how yummy the drink is, followed by a "#yummydrinksareyummy". What the fuck is hash tagging facebook statuses all about? #pricks.

Hash tagging is a parallel to the instagram filter - an attempt to trend, and be noticed. They both aim to add a gloss to what is otherwise banal. People are attempting to transverge media: the hash tag of twitter becoming appropraited on facebook whilst the characteristics of film as a medium being appropriated in digital photogaraphs.

Personally, I believe social media is a document we reflect our ego onto. Upon daily reflection of this document which is always live and present, the photograph instantly becomes part of that document from the moment it was taken (the taker knowing full well that it will be uploaded onto facebook). Knowing then that the photograph will be part of this document and posted at a date and time recorded precisely by facebook, the photograph becomes information in a document, which can be viewed at a later date and therefore even at the moment of taking the photograph, the photograph is old. And what do old photographs look like? Grainy? Discoloured? Soft? Weathered? Bingo!...the instagram app can do all that. #Beingpostmodernisbeingahipster

Immersed in a nuance of tungsten we look out for nature and all its wonderment,
Packaged in squares of plastic transparency we weigh it, pay for it, breathe in deep so as not to waste it,
Then another square of a certain transparency speaks to us, flickers at us until a remote control controls remotely.
And as we breathe nature in further in a scatter of halogen, we notice that this disembodied vision is likely to happen all over again and we reach for a square of reflective packaging, and the halogen hits the surface and the contours are warping and scattering.
We graze on the reflective squares content, one square meal.
We gaze at the square pixels on a square area, it illuminates, speaks to us,
we touch screen.

Facebook mutation.

I've noticed some changes in Facebook. It has been drastically altered and tweaked but also the way many of us use it has changed. Originally, when many of us had a relatively lowly number of Facebook 'friends' i believe it used it more as a web tool to stay in touch with your immediate mates. Now it really has become a community, a social realm, and a living space. The process is catalysed by a growth in the number of friends we all have. Originally I might have denied friendship with people who I only knew as acquaintances because they technically weren't my friends, but somewhere along the lines this stopped and i would accept people i barely knew or occasionally didn't know at all. It is as if i have lost a personal level and became part of a virtual democracy where to deny someone a virtual friendship wouldn't be playing the game fairly. The more 'friends' we have, the more we feel obliged to mitigate our personal sense of friendship and instead replace it with the false utopianism of Facebook. With the utopian ideals of a virtual democracy, censorship is quite a telling attribute - by which i mean censorship of ones own thoughts, opinions, likes etc appearing as status updates or comments etc etc. I should think that it may sometimes cross your mind whether your post is appropriate or unfair or just plain rude, and with the more people watching the more we generally feel the necessity to censor the impression we make on the site. If i continue this presumption that we censor what we post on Facebook then it surely contradicts the utopian intent that we believe Facebook to be and aims to exude (obvious examples of utopianism include a connection with someone being called a 'friend, and simply the 'like' button.) As a neutral vehicle for expression it should be teeming with individuality but i feel as if we are reaching a point where it is a dumping ground for our failure to express ourselves at all. Yes the amount of information uploaded onto the site increases second by second but does this actually make Facebook a richer society? No, because its a website. Let us all remind ourselves that it's a fucking website.

I think it's fair to say that Facebook has become a huge portion of many of our lives, so much so that i get the sense that maybe we are starting to live our lives only to document it on Facebook, to advertise ourselves, give ourselves a certain gloss or sheen? If Karl Marx was to take a look at Facebook he would probably see it as an extension of his theory of 'Alienation', bound tightly to a rejection of capitalism. Part of his theory states that, in manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes a mere living appendage. This i feel is poignant because i feel it is as if many of us may be becoming lifeless appendages to our own Facebook page? On the other hand Marx might have really liked this whole social networking thing because it appeals to communist ideals of a classless, moneyless and stateless establishment.

Do we create a Facebook page for other peoples consumption or for ourselves to consume? If we go out for a day and dont take any photographs, don't post a location update or status update and so on, did we ever go on a day out?... or to put it another way if a tree falls down in a forest, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? But are we now the trees and is Facebook the forest? Are we now beginning to bypass the part of this philosophical thought experiment where it matters if there is any human perception? I'm getting the impression that we are all getting a bit confused about reality because of our obsession with social networking, but what's worse is that I am also getting the impression that many of us aren't realising that there might be a confusion in reality at all.

We are extremely social animals and im not sure whether virtual friendships appeal to anything more than our virtual selves. Comporting social aspects in a cyber space makes me wonder at root whether any of the information on Facebook is a social document of us or whether it is actually a document of Facebook's social effect on us.

As Ernst Fischer wrote, 'We have become so accustomed to living in a world of commodities, where nature is perhaps only a poster for a holiday resort and man only an advertisement for a new product, we exist in such a turmoil of alienated objects offered cheaply for sale, that we hardly ask ourselves any longer what it is that magically transforms objects of necessity (or fashion) into commodities, and what is the true nature of the witches' Sabbath, ablaze with neon moons and synthetic constellations, that has become our day to day reality'.

Jesus Christ!

It's christmas time. Christmas time is different to real time. Real time implies a reality whereas Christmas time is the opposite, based upon the birth of God's little whipper-snapper. It's a celebration of the warping of time. Warped in the sense that we measure our calendar from the birth of jesus and therefore we are constantly celebrating christmas whether we like it or not. Isn't it bizarre how we began measuring time from the birth of someone? I'd love it if i was jesus and someone asked me what the date was, i'd be like: 'I was born 25th December 20 years ago so work it out you mortal scum...oh yeh, and love thy fucking neighbour would ya?'.

I'd much rather the calendar start with the creation of earth rather than a baby. So it's the year 4,540,000,000...ish. Christmas time is also warped by the fact that Christmas goes on for fucking ever. They must have measured Christmas from when Jesus first started crowning, and since he was known for his thorny crown i reckon Mary must have been in labour longer than Tony Blair. But what better way to celebrate the birth of God's son than advertise piles of shit that i don't want or need? There's a constant plethora of perfume adverts at the moment - each as wanky as the other. Dog Shit - By Calvin Klein, Windy-pops - By Jean-Paul-Gaultier, Complete and Utter Rancid Gooch - By Gucci. It makes me want to go back in time and kill baby jesus... that King Herod was onto something there... Maybe i was King Herod in a previous life? Well God, if you have another spawn of your seed on this earth, im going to make sure my next incarnation checks amongst the reeds. I spose it was those three kings fault for all this obsession with pointless presents. Here's my idea of how their presents went down:

Three Kings: "Awww look at that beautiful little fragile newly born baby! 'Ere you go, we got together and bought you some Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh, good aint it!?"

Mary: " That's lovely.... we could really do with feeding Jesus though, we have no food and he is weak... im also really scared that he will get an infection as we are in a dirty stable and the hay we are using as bedding is covered in horse shit"

Three Kings: "What you trying to say like?! That you are not interested in material items and only in necessities?"

Mary: "Well yeh, those are the Christian values i follow"

Three Kings: "Whats that mean? What does Christian mean?"

Mary: "Well it hasn't been invented yet but yeh, this whole Christian thing is going to be fucking huge!...and oh yeh, the date is no longer December 25th 4,540,000,000...ish but December 25th 0."

Three Kings: "Well this all sounds mental!? I'll tell you what, we won't bother with actually believing this Christianity thing you just made up but we will continue to celebrate it as a tradition where we give useless random bollocks to each other... things like socks, tie racks and a multitude of things from gadget shops and Hawkins Bazaar".

There are two more ways in which Christams warps time, and they go hand in hand. Boredom and Drinking. Sometimes in the Christmas holiday i genuinely feel like I am a character created by a twisted and balding teenage sci-fi nerd. The plot of his sci-fi novel revolves around a character trapped in a vortex of time which can only be battled by heinous quantities of beer and spirits accompanied by handfuls of mini-cheddars and other cheese orientated savories. It's a character that you would think is fun to be, apart from the bloke that invented the character decides that the character suffers from heartburn and weird poos.

Merry Xmas to the small number of people who read this, and to the large number of people who haven't read this but could also potentially offend.

Dunes are pon. (June Sarpong)

Well here it is. Haven't done a blog since in months and months.

It's So Fucking Hot.

It so fucking hot,
Heat-induced scrot-rot.

Sweaty as pigs,
Balls like dried figs.

Swealtering like bacon,
Testes looking more like raisins.

Perspiring from your hairy brain,
As you do a dance to encourage rain.

Fallen back on your settee,
Leather stuck to the back of your knee.

Fuckin cryin' about this heat,
Ballbag's smell,
Is resembling wheat.

Why I constantly Cry About Internet Being Shit Yet Still Use It.

The title was going to be "Why I constantly Cry About The Internet Being Shit" but ironically I am posting a blog via the internet for you to read,so I reasoned this irony with an insight into why I use it - consequently adding a facet to this little piece of writing which acts as an explanation to why the internet's shit, otherwise i would have purely posted a status on Facebook saying "Internet is shit", or as some of you might like to post "Internet is shit :/" to try and add a tiny amount of emotion and humour - humour in the sense that they are humouring themselves as well as an attempt to be vaguely humourous via the inclusion of a colon and a slash. This is virtual humour in its lowest form and may aswell be described as 'toilet humour'. It's major similarities with a toilet being the likely hoods of 'colons' being active and 'slashing' aplenty. The inclusion of emotion via a variance of alphabet, numbers and all manner of symbols available at your finger tips, is its own alphabet for emotions. But when i use these codes to send an emotion i won't truely be smiling, frowning, angry, shocked. My face doesn't falter, and I'm pretty sure other people's face's don't either. We are virtually feeling these emotions, and just like a computer, read the data without understanding the true interpretations or knowing whether the interpretations are true. We don't act organically as we should. Stimulus & Response, rarely anything else. Acting like droids for large portions of our days as we carry out codes into an item that stores the codes and grows like, well, ironically like an organism.

Computers are becoming the organic substance and reality itself gets sucked into it, becoming distorted and degrading every aspect. Every aspect converted to just a series of 0's and 1's. When i talk about the poisoning of social interaction my emphasis is aimed at social networking, namely facebook of course. I'm not pretending that i don't use it, i certainly do, and if you are actually reading this it would likely to have been via a link from my facebook. Its ease of sharing is unrivaled, to the extent we might, (and surprisingly often), post a status about the most menial, unconstructive and neutral things such as what we've just eaten. Utterly annoying... I've done it myself a lot. However, that doesn't stop my addiction to this wasteland of white pixels scattered with an ever growing and densely poppulated sea of bollocks. It even has an autonomous effect on the way we photograph and are photographing ourselves and each other. Note that it is an 'effect' and not 'affect' because it bipasses the emotional level - once again we act as if we are digital devices to be stored on computer. Our essence captured via the interpretation of a digital device, stored as data known as pixels and then stored as web data which we then subjectively judge, trying to infer a personality and completely failing to understand the complexities of the people we shuffle through. On a personal level, I found that if you hastily click through the photographs then it is likely that you do not know that person well and should really either delete them as a friend or get to know them. If, however, you gaze at the photographs, you are likely to be experience a human response, and to an extent it musters a provokement and recollection of attatched thought, nostalgia. I've found that even this enjoyment can become pacified with high facebook usage.

How we look in photographs knowing that they will be published and viewed by friends and acquaintances and even strangers is very evident, and for some girls can be crushing. Often the harder we might try to look good in a photograph the more obviously uncomfortable we are about it. There are many women, and men aswell, that will use the same expression, body language, and gestures over and over again. The photograph becomes a ritual as you pose, holding yourself still in anticipation to became a virtual piece of data, when it is the camera that holds you still anyway. Now as we are being photographed we autonomously envisage ourselves virtually, as an entity existing on the internet to be viewed by others, and for some, this is enough to cement a concrete response to the stimulus - photo, after photo, after photo.

The irony in this whole blog post is my obvious involvement with social networking, blogging, youtube etc. In truth, the internet's practicalities and ease are devestatingly potent and for this reason I can't see myself ever not using it due to it's addictive nature. Practicalities and ease are what we strive for yet i think we all know its accessibility is not rewarding. How much better is it to meet and talk with a friend than to talk to them on the internet? Taking a step back from the situation it is easy to recognise the problem in evolutionary terms, viewing humans just as any other animal. Why waste precious energy doing stuff and risking a higher percentage of not surviving when you could instead be resting and increasing your chances of passing your genes on to another generation? So we all rest and enjoy the comfort of the internet and the knowledge it beholds, and continue to pass our genes on as a duty to feed the young hatchling - the internet.

My title is 'Why I Constantly Cry About Internet Being Shit Yet Still Use It'. This title can be answered simply through analysing the title itself. When i say that I constantly 'cry about internet being shit' I am explaining two very human organic processes, in the description of a soulless and self unaware invention. The friction between natural process and digital environment highlights the main point I am basically making that as a species we are not all that well suited to live our lives virtually. Think of computer nerds, who have unfortunately for whatever reason have found they are not well suited to the natural social environment so they turn to computers for solace. They do not compute with society so they purely compute.

Now time to check my facebook...