Once upon a time – in a dim and distant land known as the ’90s – “no filter” applied to people who let their mouth lead their brain, to the sort of person who writes columns, in fact. The rise of Instagram in the ’10s (there really is no good label for the years between 2010 and 2019), and now the dominance of TikTok, has led to a shift in meaning. #Nofilter is a claim to authenticity; a label to indicate that the image you are presenting has not been tweaked, tightened, edited, or subject to the invisible hand of an AI stylist.
Linguists call it a semantic shift. Other examples include “naïve”, which went from a flattering way of describing something “natural” to – around 1893 – an insult meaning “artless and unthinkingly ignorant”. And “pretty” began as a synonym for “crafty”, then moved through the Shakespearian “well-conceived” into its current meaning of “attractive”, when used as an adjective, and “somewhat” as an adverb (eg “that previous sentence is pretty ugly”).
The way we see ourselves and others continually shifts; even sexiness isn’t static
The way we see ourselves and others continually shifts; even sexiness isn’t static. Dr Elena Janega, author of The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, writes that, despite the copious and spurious claims of the (mostly) male proponents of evolutionary psychology, the so-called hourglass figure doesn’t have “universal and enduring appeal”. In fact, she explains, for medieval horndogs, women with “a belly, a long abdomen, and a lot of ass” were the hottest thing going. There are numerous paintings which illustrate this.
We experience those images through a filter, such as the artist’s brief from their patron to make kings and queens distinctly more attractive than they would have been in the room by removing all kinds of blemishes, pustules, scars and scabs. Filters change according to the assumptions and prejudices of the era, but at no time in history have humans’ depictions of themselves been free of them: even cave people scratched images that portrayed them at their heroic best.
Technology has increased both the scale of image production and our access to tools that enable us to alter them. PhotoShop supercharged magazine-cover deceptions, superseding the previous, fiddly process of airbrushing. Instagram’s simple filters, which did things like applying a vintage sheen or blowing out the colours in a photo, have evolved into AI-enhanced versions that remake your image. You can tweak your face in real-time and on video into a “better” version or, at least, one closer to an accepted beauty standard.
It’s not surprising some people end up craving surgical interventions that make these digital dreams into fleshy reality. But filters are a symptom of societal problems as well as a cause. The advertisements of media and beauty brands have long been fuelling a sense of dissatisfaction and dysphoria.
Janega writes that damsels – ladies-in-waiting – acted as “influencers in reverse”, who demonstrated their mistress’s importance by modelling their own inferiority. She describes how Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, would be surrounded by damsels, “like a late medieval version of a selfie full of Instagram baddies [with] a caption that says, ‘Quiet Tuesday in with these idiots, yawn.’”
In 2014, a social media marketing agency called Spredfast claimed that eleven per cent of photos on Instagram captioned with the #nofilter hashtag did, in fact, feature some kind of filter. I suspect that’s a wild understatement. There are many tools to edit photos before you post them on social media.
The use of filters on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and beyond has been seized upon by marketing people. Dove – which got years of press from its Real Beauty campaign which took the… get this! …amazing decision to feature women of various shapes and sizes – has seized upon filter paranoia for its latest campaign.
Claiming that, by the age of thirteen, 80% use filters to change the way they look online, Dove says it’s “on a mission to tackle the issue of real beauty standards in the digital era” and is pushing the idea of the Reverse Selfie: a photo that strips away the filters to reveal the “real” face behind them. Dove’s real mission is to sell products it wants you to believe you need.
Unilever – Dove’s parent company – inserts itself into children’s lives from the very beginning. In fact, it wants to have an influence even before they’re born, marketing brands to parents even as their babies are safely ensconced in amniotic fluid – an environment where the advertising industry has yet to install billboards or broadcast ads.
Powerful real-time filters are dangerous for children and teenagers’ self-image, especially for girls. But Unilever pretending to be deeply concerned about that is like a fox with feathers still sticking out of its chops warning chickens that the hen house is insufficiently secure.
Bill Hicks nailed this back in the ’90s when “no filter” had not yet gone through the semantic shift. He said: “I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: ‘Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market.’ …Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.”
Even without a filter, I can say it no better.
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
