Spelunking the depths of social media seems like a colourful analogy, but lately my forays into deeper dabbling in content development and sharing—writing blogs, taking black and white photography, making videos, or whatever—has made such analogies much more poignant and apt. 

Take the black and white photos for example. This very blog and my theme of posting a random monochromatic pic with each post left me with an abundance of such photos. I thought it might be fun and interesting to start a new Instagram account with just those photos.  A themed account. No aspirations besides sharing.

Three months on the account seems reasonably successful, in that I have a few hundred followers—but for the life of me I can’t tell which of those followers are real, which are scams, which are bots, which are simply phantoms of the machine itself. It is disorienting and strange. Virtually no authentic human engagement happens there. Perhaps because of the account’s newness or maybe due to its niche topic he account has become a magnet for a haunted collection of shadows that are nigh impossible to pin down. I don’t know if more than a few of those accounts are real or…

Wait.

What does“real” mean anymore anyway? Ever since voices, images, personalities, and even relationships can all be simulated, what is real? Humans do more than consume information and content, rather we attach an emotional value to the authenticity of its source, trusting falsehoods from friends while ignoring invisible expertise, so what does it mean to be real when the truth is generated?  What happens when none of us know is the other is a machine or an actual human? And how can we ever know?

I want to know, even though I sometimes wonder if there is a good answer—or even the answer we might like to hear—and I’ll be digging into this under the topic Authenticity & Synthesis as I continue writing on this blog. Stay tuned.