The Light of Our Lives?

OUR OBSESSION WITH PERCEPTION

Written by Gabrielle Gronewold, Editor in Chief Graphic by Jessica Tenenbaum, Honorary Art Director and Staff Graphic Artist

Iwill always remember joining Moda. Moda has served as a great “beacon” in my life—giving me a space to learn new things, meet some of my best friends and be incredibly challenged. Moda is also a beacon in the sense that it has taught me a magnitude about our relationships with perception.

For example, during my freshman year, I could have never imagined joining Moda—I was mesmerized by the publication, but truly could not fathom myself being able to do something like that. My best friend encouraged me to join, perceiving this was something I would love and be capable of doing, but I didn’t see it. When I finally did join sometime later, I continued to fight this perception of not totally seeing myself within the walls of Moda. In many ways, I continued to doubt my creativity and capability. Over my course in Moda, I’ve heard many echo this same feeling, symbolizing two things—that there is a great deal more we can do to make people’s creativity feel welcomed and that there is a great deal we can do as individuals to understand perception.

Perception is the “organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.”1 Perception is a subconscious function that guides us in interpreting and handling the world around us. It’s how we visualize and then draft our realities, rooted in our senses and psychology.

There are sound measures to our perception modes—but they differ from person to person. The 2,000 to 4,000 tastebud receptors on our tongues all give us a different palette—allowing us to perceive the food we consume and want to consume in individualistic ways.2 Our vision also varies, giving us all a greater independence in the way we physically perceive the world. Individuals who don’t experience some senses, such as deaf or blind people, further our understanding that the way we perceive the world is not congruent and there is no one way to live or understand living. This is furthered by things like cultural perception, or the concept of how culture informs life. We are made up of the language, food, art, religion and thoughts that surround us, influencing who we are and how we ingest and perceive things.3

The individual influence and individualistic nature of our perception proves that there is a built-up tool kit that gives us a sort of agency and authority in our perception. We have seen and survived in the world and we can be confident in our interpretations. Perception is also manmade and our personal influence on how we see the world can be challenged. If we create our internal realities and we are not perfect individuals, then we are not foolproof vessels of visualization.

As we sit in the driver’s seat of our own realities, we can manipulate things and convince ourselves of things we so badly want to see. In recent years, we have leaned into conversations around imposter syndrome, or the personal act of doubting your abilities and feeling fraudulent. It often affects high-achieving people from accepting their achievements.

Rather than living to perceive, we are perceiving to live.

In 1978 psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes studied the concept, primarily in women. They focused on high-achieving women and concluded that they were persistent “in believing they were not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.”4 For decades we have continued pitting this imposter syndrome as a women-centric trait. Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey wrote for the Harvard Business Review that this socially held belief can be challenged, allowing us to question what fosters this evident phenomenon in the first place.5

3 Psych Neuro, “Culture’s Influence on Perception,” On Psychology and Neuroscience, Feb. 17, 2016. 4 Kirsten Weir, “Feel like a fraud?” American Psychological Association, accessed May 16, 2022. 5 Ruchika Tulshyan Jodi-Ann Burey, “Stop Telling women They Have Imposter Syndrome,” Harvard Business Review, Feb. 11, 2021.

When it comes to imposter syndrome, people—especially those who have been routinely affected by imposter syndrome on a societal scale—can and should question our perception. Maybe the way we perceive things isn’t totally accurate. Maybe the fabrication of our perception can be questioned. I was right about a few things when I was 18— like that Moda was very cool and worth turning my head towards. I was wrong about a lot too—like that I was a complete, creative lost cause.

Our obsession with perception is accentuated when we observe our relationship with social media. Pew Research shows that 72% of Americans today use some type of social media. The rate of social media usage adaptation has been rapid, growing from 5% in 2005 to 50% in 2011, and then a 22% jump to today. 46% to 70% of Americans are using the most popular social sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and YouTube on a daily basis.6 Social media upholds our society’s digital interconnections and is built upon perception.

Our social perceptions are activated on social media—we see and hear curated images, storylines and presentations. Even if one claims their social media presence is casual and uncalculated, perception denies this. As a form of social perception, social media cannot avoid the societal interconnection that it sits upon.

The concept of the “content farm” affirms this. A content farm alludes to the recent discourse around social media content and the curation and expectation for curation. Many took to social media to define the 2022 Coachella event that happened just over a month ago as a “content farm” which sponsored creating social activations rather than enjoying the present moment.

Influencer Naomi Mahdesian made a TikTok sharing that “The commercialism and the marketing killed the authenticity part of it for me. I don’t even think I’ve seen content about the music. It felt like one of those museums where you only go to get selfies, rather than a music festival.”7

We have reached a point where living for social media has caused us to value perception and curating perception more than we value the living itself. Rather than living to perceive, we are perceiving to live. We are obsessing with an image and how the consumption of that image will play out. As a basic pro-social and instinctual human behavior, perception is a tool; it’s a guiding light to the food we like; the things we dream of; the people we surround ourselves with. It helps us navigate and manage our experiences. Yet the bounds of the human mind are limited and faulted. Perception is influenced by the constraints of the world, while also being influenced by the manipulation of ourselves as curators and perceivers. ■