Taking it to the next level, if a vacation was out of your budget this year, they’ll insert an exotic background into your photographs to give the illusion of an expensive, exciting holiday spent on foreign soil.
It’s a virtual way of keeping up with the Joneses, but it does raise the question of who these retouched images are meant to impress. After all, our friends and family see us on a day-to-day basis and therefore know how we look (and are probably sane enough to differentiate between “vacation glow” and “digital retouching” as they glance through our albums). Friends that we only know online will be fooled, strangers will be tricked, and the pictures on our fridge will suddenly be of people who look almost, but not quite, like us - but what’s the point?
More importantly, does this mean a sad farewell to the embarrassing unretouched snapshots that lurk in our photo albums? In the future, will we bolster our memories by looking at digitally enhanced replicas of our lives? Is this the new reality?
