Summary:

Filters have become an important part of popular visual culture.  We don’t just filter our images before we post them on Instagram, though: filters has become an important and far more general concept in today’s digital culture. The word filter has been used in many domains, but usually to describe a process where something is removed. A filter can be a piece of felt or a piece of paper which filters out dust, dirt or other impurities when water is poured through it or air blows through it. A screen can filter out certain
colours in light. On a cigarette a filter stops some of the harmful substances
from reaching the smoker’s lungs.  Instagram filters may in fact remove data, for instance by making a color image black and white, but often the perceived effect is of adding to the image: boosting the colors, adding borders, creating a vignette effect or blurring parts of the image. Technically the coffee filter does stop the ground coffee beans from getting into the pot beneath. An app like Sprout Baby is more of a technology filter, it provides even clearer rules. Baby journals have always had an element of quantitative tracking such as first smile, first steps weight and height charts and even information about which teeth came in on which date. Technological filters allow us to express ourselves in certain ways but not in others. We can apply certain filters to an image we post to Instagram but not others.(Rettburg)

Main Idea:

The main idea of this filter is to inform us how much we actually use filters from it being online to in person.

Key terms:

Filter: a porous device for removing impurities or solid particles from a liquid or gas passed through it.

Cultural phenomenon:  occurs when certain individuals behave a certain way merely because other individuals do as well

Digital Culture: stands for the contemporary phase of communication technologies

Defamiliarise : render unfamiliar or strange (used especially in the context of art and literature)

Making Connections:

Honestly this whole chapter connects to everyday life for us. There’s so many things we may think don’t necessarily contain a filter of some sort but actually does. Its crazy how even though we may not try to filter something, we all ways end up doing it. Not that its a bad thing, but just now it’s a common thing to do in life now. Ever since snap chat or Instagram added the “filters” that’s really all you see on social media now. Filters have came a long way from being just a change of color to a picture or cropping a picture to adding different things to a picture that has been created.