Perception – the great mystery
This topic was brought to mind by this post that appeared in Linked In one day.
Of course, in the comments there were two sides reacting to this image – no surprise there since he is such a controversial figure. But it did get me thinking about how we can see the same image through two totally different perceptions – one true and the other false (in my mind). How? How did we get here? And how do we get out of this conundrum? It is so hard for me to fathom the divide we are living in today.
This mystery reminds me of the gold and white dress that appeared in the news back in 2015:
The dress became a viral sensation because some people saw gold and white (I see the dress in those colors) while others saw black and blue. It turns out the dress is black and blue, but even with that set of facts, I still see gold and white. I cannot convince myself to see black and blue – my brain won’t let me. It simply won’t let me see otherwise. (For the fascinating story on how that image came to be, how it became viral and why our brains might translate the image from black and blue to gold and white, go to this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress.)
What if those who see him as a great President has a brain that is translating him something similar to the gold and white dress? I struggle with that analogy because the brain would have to translate not the visuals but the facts around his character. I struggle with the idea that a large number of people would ignore the child separation policy that left over 600 children still apart from their parents, two or three years later. How do you say that is okay and vote for him? I struggle with the idea that as we learned that Russia had a bounty on our soldiers’ head, Republicans did not demand Trump to do something. This is the party that extols the Constitution, our military boys and the glory of patriotism. And yet there was silence. I struggle with the fact that many months later, with the coronavirus ravaging our
communities this winter, some Trump supporters are still in denial – they simply won’t wear masks, won’t social distance, won’t abide by medical suggestions not to gather for the holidays. People are dying around them and still, they deny. The news reported that he knew back in February how deadly this virus was and downplayed the seriousness of it. His supporters? They still support him despite all of his lies.
I struggle with the idea that 74 million of our citizens voted for him. Seventy-four versus eighty million: to me, that’s close enough to fifty/fifty. I struggle with that, I struggle mightily. It is incomprehensible that they cannot see for what he is.
About Google Web Stories
At its present state, I cannot add text to the images in the Google Stories plug in because the story won’t save. I don’t know if the problem stems from my host server not allowing me to store these images and text together or if there is something else blocking me from saving the Google stories. I just can’t use Google stories text system. At the present time, I have to use images that already contain the text on them which means that Google can’t tell what the story is or if there is any story at all. So much for that.
This series took some time to create because with Google Web Stories you have to first have some sort of story to tell. Secondly, you have to have a decent set of imagery that can go along with the story. The Linked In post prompted the initial story but I had no images; hence, I had to create them. Some I already had on hand but others I had to create which took a couple of weeks. Part of the image development concerned the overall imagery system that would tie the images together (colors, type, style such as photographs or illustration or ???), so I had to play around for a while to see which ideas and images could be developed most effectively. Then I had to work on getting all of the colors to be the same from image to image because my original process did not set up a palette of colors – my blue background would vary from image to image just so slightly. Some pictures had to be redone once I settled on the colors.
I also had to re-do the story line a couple of times to make it flow better without getting into too much text on the picture. And since this project took about a month to develop, new and better ideas kept popping up that necessitated rearranging the images and story. During the development, I saw a Futur video on YouTube that said that your very first image needs to be captivating to pull in people or you will lose them. I had failed at that, so I had to re-do the very first one to be more “eye-catching”. I’m not sure if I succeeded.
I’m still not totally happy with the storyline, and you can tell that towards the end I started to rush through. But, I needed to move on.
Because I have a new storyline and I have no imagery for it yet.
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