Everyone in the
twitterverse is all a-twitter about this ridiculous photo of a dress.
Leaving behind the mindless chirping for a moment (which we shall try
not to sound too condescending about, because God knows I spent half the
morning talking with my cow-orkers about that stupid dress, too), I'd
like to examine the phenomenon for a deeper narrative. It shouldn't
take but about a quarter second to find one... ahh, there it is.
The
first article I read about the dress was on Gawker, a website I avoid
(because, honestly, I don't think those people would enjoy reading the
things I write about, either. They're fine, for what they are, but I
don't think I'm one of them, and that's fine, too). But what struck me
was how very angry they were about the dress. The headline, I think I
am quoting accurately here, is "What color is this fucking dress
anyway??" The article went on to question how some fucktards were
calling it white and gold, when any idiot can see it's clearly blue and
black, and WTF is wrong with these sonsabitches anyway, and what is the
deal with this mofo dress?
(The deal with the mofo dress,
by the way, is obviously that it's a terrible picture, overexposed and
badly backlit. Whether the actual subject of the picture was originally
black and blue, gold and white, or polkadotted and plaid is near
impossible to tell, probably even in the original picture.)
But
what's really interesting about the picture to me is that, in the
current media environment, I probably saw something different from what
you saw. I've actually seen it about six times now, and it looked
different every time, because the one way I haven't seen it is the only
way I would have been able to a hundred years ago -- printed in a
newspaper or a magazine.
I saw it in a dark room and in a
well-lit office, under fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, and
natural light streaming in through a window. I saw it on two different
laptops, two different cell phones, and three different desktop monitors
-- all with different resolutions and all with brightness settings at
different places. I saw it on facepage a few times, of course, and I
saw it on Wired's website, which has an interesting CSS setting so that,
when you mouseover an image, it raises the brightness level.
What
I'm saying is, I have no idea what the photographer saw when he took
it, and the variations of color, brightness, resolution, and even the
angles at which I was looking at the monitor when I saw it mean that I
never will know. I've seen the image "with my own eyes" a dozen times
-- and it's never looked the same twice. And yes, at least twice, it's
looked blue and black to me, just for a second.
The deeper
narrative here is how frustrating it is to communicate with someone when
you've somehow been fooled into thinking you've had a common
experience. The internet was supposed to bring us closer, and in a lot
of ways it has -- the "global village" is absolutely a thing; I'm able
to read things that someone anywhere in the world and most places in
outer space wrote within minutes after they've written it. It's a
wonderful world for communicating. But our experiences, our backgrounds
and environments, are still as different as they ever were.
I'm
super rich -- like, ridiculously wealthy. In comparison with probably
5.5 billion people on this planet, I have more material advantages and
less concern about being materially secure in my future than they ever
will; in comparison with the billions who have lived throughout history,
I'm living in another world from most of them just because I can say
the following sentence: "I have no fear of ever starving to death or
dying from exposure to the elements." Think how many centuries passed
where virtually no man living could have said that sentence. But even
for today, even for my nation, even for my culture and skin color, I'm
fairly well off. I have to work forty-plus hours a week -- but I don't
have to work so often that I have to give up blogging, for instance, or
seeing my kids.
I can write this blog post and it can be
read by anyone with an internet connection within minutes, and I can
write it well enough and literately enough that it builds an empathy
with people. But I don't share those experiences -- I can't sympathize
with so many people; my privileges lie between us. I've never been
afraid to walk in a city alone at night. I've never feared a policeman
pulling me over. I've never wondered how I'd feed my children. I've
never had to decide if I should sleep with my boss or look for a new
job.
People on the internet get angry in their fights about
values pretty often, because they forget these things -- you're not
arguing with who share your environment or your background; you just
share access to the same internet right now. And you have to use it not
to shout down other positions but to learn about them.
#Blacklivesmatter, #Yesallwomen, #Bostonstrong -- they're all hashtags
that represent things that are foreign to me. The choice that confronts
me, each time, is either to reject it out of hand, ignoring the voices
that are so foreign to me, or to try to sympathize with them, to learn
their language.
Some bizarre deviant crazy people out there
really do see a blue and black dress. The lesson of the dress photo is
that you have a choice -- either reject them as bizarre deviant crazy
people, or try to see a blue and black dress yourownself.
