After gazing at dozens of uploaded holiday party celebrations hitting Facebook this week I could not help but wonder if all these “Tis the Season” albums represent the reality of our lives.

Are we really having that much fun or are these manufactured “images” that we want others to see?

Recently a close bud was caught in a Gossip Girlsesque ring when he was “spotted” in a series of photos taken while he was away for a weekend with a platonic friend. From the classic face-to-face hand held party shots to close ups of the two on the dance floor the “e”-vidence was there.

When a romanTECH interest confronted him about these pics his answer was surprisingly enlightened: What you don’t see on Facebook is what I was thinking and feeling all weekend. I’m not sure he realized it, but he was on to something.

Our photos don’t really tell the true stories of our lives and experiences. Instead they allow us to construct an “image” of our experiences that is cropped, edited, tagged and ultimately debuted to a very interested audience — our “friends” — that have opted in. An album of Facebook photos provides a glimpse into 30 seconds over the course of three days. What it portrays can be as easily manipulated as editing 3 weeks of “reality” into 30 minutes of “reality TV.” And if reality TV mirrored reality then “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” would need to be a full 2 hours to show how much time it takes to shellac and airbrush Kim Kardashian’s face before it appears on the screen.

So what is the point? Maybe all the photo uploading is making us a generation of “posers” — people more concerned with capturing and uploading the right moment then living it.  

But is that really the point?