There was a time when we opened a magazine and knew someone had made the decisions.

 

Someone chose the model.
The clothes.
The light.
The photograph that made the page.

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We knew we were looking at something selected.

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Now we open our phones.

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A breakfast.
A protest.
Someone getting married.
Someone crying.
A war.
A joke.
A scientific discovery.
A stranger's bedroom.
A perfect holiday.

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All sitting next to each other.

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Social media became a newspaper, a gossip column, a fashion magazine, a photo album, a shop window and someone's diary at the same time.

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And somehow, we became part of the edit.

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We follow.
We unfollow.
We stop.
We scroll.

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We choose what we want to see.

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And slowly, what we choose starts choosing what we see.

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Two people can open the same app and find completely different versions of the world waiting for them.

 

Because on the other side of the screen, someone else is choosing too.

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What to show.
What to leave out.
Which moment stays.
Which one disappears.

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A photograph of someone laughing can be real.

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So can the argument twenty minutes before it.

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One doesn't make the other a lie.

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It just wasn't in the frame.

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And maybe that's not new.

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Long before we had feeds, we were already deciding which parts of ourselves other people got to see.

 

We answer I'm fine.

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We tell one friend something we don't tell another.

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We walk into work differently than we walk into our homes.

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Social media didn't invent that.

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It gave it a camera.

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And now there are more ways to look than ever before.

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We can watch someone's life on the other side of the world before breakfast.

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Learn something in thirty seconds.

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Find people we may never have found otherwise.

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See beauty we didn't know existed.

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See pain we might never have known was there.

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Or spend an hour watching dogs fall off sofas.

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Everything is there.

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And still, none of us sees everything.

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We talk a lot about what is real online.

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Who is authentic.
Who is performing.
Who is pretending.
Who is telling the truth.

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But maybe those lines aren't as clean as we'd like them to be.

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Something can be curated and still be true.

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Something can look completely unfiltered and still have been chosen.

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Even honesty has an angle.

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So when someone shows us the beautiful part, are they pretending?

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When someone shows us the difficult part, are they more real?

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And why do some things make us stay while others make us scroll?

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Maybe we want the beautiful version.

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Maybe sometimes we don't.

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Maybe we want to believe what already makes sense to us.

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Maybe we simply keep looking until we find a version that does.

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There is the person choosing what to show.

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There is the platform choosing what reaches us.

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And there is us

choosing what to stop for.

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What to ignore.

What to question.

What to believe.