You may have seen the story about a Dutch woman called Zilla van den Born, her parents dropped her at the airport on 23 April, believing she was off to see Thailand, Cambodia and Laos over a month-long holiday. Instead, she secretly returned to her flat, and lived undercover while posting fake images and status updates on Facebook of her adventures on holiday. She also sent postcards to people although no one noticed they had Dutch postmarks and wore disguises when she went outside her flat so that no one would recognise her. It was a funny story and she went to quite a lot of trouble to produce the fakes including going to her local swimming pool to take the photo of herself underwater (see pic on left) and posing in various positions to make it look like she was really in the picture (see bottom picture). She's a graphic designer so is experienced with using Photoshop and she did eventually tell people that the photos were faked. She explained why she did it - “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, thereby we create an online ideal world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality.” Of course the manipulation of photographs has been going on since the invention of photography, but with social media and Photoshop it's easier to create an imaginary reality. This story may also have been a publicity stunt as the internet loves these kind of stories and they quickly go viral. She has an interesting site showing some of her graphic design work which you might like to check out. Link here - http://www.zillavandenborn.nl/ Comments are closed.
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