The Digital Camera Comeback Is Just a Flattering Filter

Using Facetune is widely perceived as shameful, and Retrica is now embarrassing, so Gen Z has artfully co-opted the digital camera as a socially sanctioned way to look good in pictures without having to do anything to them. And, based on the media attention given to this trend, we have managed to have our elaborately simple way of softening pores and the world’s lacklustre reality be simultaneously cast as a subversive aesthetic movement.

In CBC’s coverage of the topic, Lily Dupuis labels the generational pull towards digital cameras a “counter-cultural technological practice.” She links it to the same urge that has led to a chunk of the Gen Z population to trade their smart phone for a flip phone in the name of more conscious and intentional integration of technology into daily life. But I think that attributing the comeback of both forms of old new media to the same digital detox impulse is a false cause fallacy.

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