ACT Reading — Humanities — Drill 4

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "The Edited Self: Photography and the Problem of Authenticity" by Yusuf Adebayo (©2021, Visual Culture Quarterly). We have been selecting which images of ourselves to share since long before the smartphone. The formal portrait, the holiday photograph tucked into a Christmas card, the wedding album — each was a curated artifact, a negotiation between how we appeared and how we wished to be remembered. What has changed in the age of social media is not the impulse to curate but the scale, the speed, and the relentlessness of the enterprise. A portrait painted in the seventeenth century required hours of sitting and resulted in a single, expensive image. A photograph taken in 1975 required film, cost money per frame, and waited days for development. Each constraint imposed a natural discipline: you chose your moments carefully because the cost of choosing poorly was real. The digital image has abolished those constraints entirely. The cost of a photograph is now effectively zero, which means the cost of a bad photograph is also zero — and so we take hundreds, select the best, and discard the rest without a second thought. What this abundance produces is not, as one might expect, a more accurate record of a life. It produces a more intensively managed one. The sheer volume of images creates the illusion of transparency — look how much I share! — while the selection process ensures that what is shared is ruthlessly filtered. We have more photographs of ourselves than any previous generation and, arguably, a less honest visual record. The philosopher's question — what is authentic self-presentation? — has become a practical one that millions of people navigate daily, mostly without noticing that they are doing philosophy at all.