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For general questions or event information, email info@starfishliving.com.
To contact us individually, use the following emails:
Jennifer Lasik -- jennifer@starfishliving.com
Fred Roe -- fred@starfishliving.com
Since the advent of social media, I know so much more about my cousins, friends and colleagues than I used to. I can name their top Starbucks drink, which restaurants they have tried recently and where they went on their last vacation. I’ve admired wedding parties, traveled vicariously through some of their trips and gotten great recommendations for date night venues and eye doctors.
And for my part, I have blown up my feed with way too many pictures of my dogs, images from my daughter’s theatre performances, and photos of our lake view in every possible variation of light and weather. Thanks to the magic and ease of digital photo editing, people who haven’t seen me in person in a while likely think I am ten years younger and twenty pounds thinner than I am. I’ve shared with all of you the delicious meals I’ve made — that is, once they were adequately posed, cropped and filtered to look irresistible. I love posting pictures of food even more than my nieces love posting memes and gifs of corgies running from behind.
Our social media is a platform for us to recommend products, websites and videos. We buy, sell and swap with each other. We post wish lists and bucket lists. I’ve been happy for you, jealous of you and inspired by you. I’ve publicly defended you and secretly judged you. It is fair to say we’ve all participated in both voyeurism and exhibitionism, courtesy of whatever device is in hand at any given moment.
We are putting ourselves “out there” at an impressive rate, with astounding detail, and documenting it all with photos or videos. How many instagram videos have you watched of some energetic person who starts their clip with, “Guys, can I just be real here?” And yet authenticity seems more more elusive than ever. We are showing more but revealing less. Somehow all of the candor is adding up to us being less vulnerable than ever before.
What seems spontaneous and candid is often actually contrived, right? We use cropping tools, filters and enhancement to make everything look brighter, better, more attractive. Have any of your been delegated to take pictures at family events lately? What used to be two snaps – the initial photo plus a spare in case someone blinked — is now an endless series of shots with pauses in between so the subjects can scrutinize themselves. By the time the whole group deems a photo Instagram-worthy, it’s been thirty shots (or thirty minutes, whichever is longer.)
Even our words go through filters. We edit our posts and then edit the edits. Thesaurus.com wordsmiths and Google fact checks everything.
It’s all made us strangely fragile — even brittle. Personal stories are prefaced with, “Don’t judge me, but….” Unkind or unflattering responses are deleted. Administrators turn off commenting to avoid criticism. Facebook groups publish guidelines stating that “negativity will not be tolerated. Positive posts only!”
These are all forms of curation. Curation is sorting, organizing and selecting pieces of a collection and making choices about what to present. Usually it refers to collections of art, literature, music and artifacts. But we also curate our lives and what we are willing to reveal about ourselves. We carefully choose others see, often creating the image of an ideal marriage, exceptional kids, thoughtful friends, and awesome vacations. Some even curate in an effort to make things look worse than they are, perhaps out of a need for sympathy or attention.
Everyone curates to some degree, often with good intentions and benign results. We share specific experiences for entertainment, advice, or to illustrate a point. We omit things that might hurt someone’s feelings or make someone worry. We downplay painful or embarrassing situations in an effort to reduce the cringe factor.
But there is a danger in excessive curation. The line between reality and fantasy gets more blurred every day. Nothing is set in stone. Basic characteristics like age, gender and race, once considered concrete, have become “fluid”. There is little that can’t be altered or improvised at with a click of a mouse. Over time we have rejected reality and consequently diminished our capacity for bravery and resilience. Honesty and integrity have become casualties of self-image and ego.
So my question to you, sweet friends, is this: How, in this social media age, do we keep our authenticity intact, and how do we offer authenticity in our relationships with our family, friends, and the people we come into contact with every day? How does the Church continue to be both salt and light? How do we demonstrate that it’s through our vulnerability that God is able to build our inner strength?
I would love to hear your thoughts about this — either in the comments or via email at jennifer@starfishliving.com. I want to write a part two — a post that focuses on the how-to of being our authentic selves vis-a-vis our faith. Will you be a part of the discussion?
Thanks for stopping by the blog – blessings to you.
-Jennifer