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Michael
@michael
At first I thought these Ghibli family portraits, face reveals, new baby photos, etc. were a passing fad but now I'm not so sure. The more I think about it, the more I think that we're seeing a real-time renegotiation of our social media social contract. It's subtle, but I think we're going to be feeling the ripple effects for decades to come. What Ghiblificiation is telling us:
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Michael pfp
Michael
@michael
Pre-GPT we had a binary choice: share our most meaningful moments online or preserve our privacy. Social media offered little middle ground between total exposure and complete withdrawal. This has been extra true for parents. Some of my friends with kids share photos freely, but many of them are downright militant about keeping their children off of the internet. The desire to share moments like your kid's first smile, their first steps, and their first dance recital is normal and human. But it's also in direct conflict with troubling questions like: Who else will see these? Where might they end up? What digital footprint am I making for someone who can't even consent yet? This feels like an impossible situation. How can we reconcile wanting to share these moments that are so meaningful to *us* without forcing that decision on the people *around* us?
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Michael pfp
Michael
@michael
Locked accounts and private, family-focused social networks work well for sharing with the grandparents but they don't solve everything. In a world where internet communities increasingly house some of our strongest and most meaningful relationships, how can we share with them too? Normally, you can't do both. It's an impossible situation. And it's exactly why these Ghibli-ified photos are so interesting to me. Passing your photo through a model doesn't diminish the love, joy, pride, and vulnerability on display but it does blunt the identifying features that could put us and the ones we care about at risk. What you're left with is a photo that, despite being less rich, paradoxically allows for *more* intimacy building and *more* connection, not less. Your haircut might not come through, but the love you have does.
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Michael pfp
Michael
@michael
We're seeing new technology enabling a new model of social sharing that splits the difference. It's not a full reveal, and it's not a full withdrawal. It's a secret third thing that's allowing people to build the deeper, emotional connections that have been so lacking in social media without putting each other at risk to do so. Yes, they're anonymized photos. But people aren't using them to hide. They're using them to show more of themselves than ever. And I think that's worth thinking about.
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