We Asked a Psychiatrist Why We’re So Obsessed with the Dog Filter

Like many people my age, I'm a habitual Snapchatter. I snap myself on the bus, dancing at work, dancing at home, making flirty faces at the camera, eating food. I like to think I'm pretty funny (not sure it resonates with others, but I can hope), and I try to share that attempt at humor with the world at least five to six times a day in the form of ten-second videos.

But what would social media be without altering reality? As someone who's always had serious body image issues, I've had a very hard time posting photos or videos of myself in the raw. If they haven't been edited, they've been cropped. If they haven't been cropped, they've been edited. If they haven't had either, they're not posted, because, compared to the rest of the competition, plain old me just isn't that flattering.

It's not uncommon for a friend to say, "This isn't my angle," or see them delete 98 of the 100 selfies they took because the lighting revealed a blemish that wasn't supposed to be shown. While we all want to show ourselves off, we only want the best parts to be seen. Curious about that need for constant broadcasting, I asked Dr. Corrine Carlisle, a psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, about Snapchat, the beloved dog filter, and our unending thirst for likes.

VICE: I'll start off by asking the obvious. Do you use Snapchat?
Dr. Carlisle: I don't. I'm not a social media user at all.

Right. I provided you with some photos of the filters on me. Did you get a chance to look at them?
I did! They were very unique. [laughs]

Why do we like filtering and manipulating our images so much nowadays?
That's a really big and really heavy question. First of all, I'd say that I'm not an expert on that whole arena. I have zero experience on any social media [platforms] and I'm really open with my patients about that. Often when I speak to young people, their experiences on social media are not positive. Most people I speak to are bullied, tricked, deceived, or abused, so I see a lot of negative potential. I read that article you linked on i-D, it's very similar.

The one about the dog filter and sexism?
Yes, and I hate to say the words out loud—slut-shaming and victim-blaming—but it's so incredibly common and wrong. The large problem with social media is that we are seeing photos of people shared that they would never want anybody to see, or only photos that they want people to see. And that can lead to incidents that are anywhere from benign to the most heinous [of abuse].

To come back to your question as to why people would be drawn to [manipulating their image]: speaking in terms of adolescents, it's the job of young people to define the space away from parents and carve out a hole for themselves in a peer group. It's about acceptance within a group and the importance of fitting into that group, and having your appearance accepted by the group. If people [in that group] are on these social media sites—and clearly, pretty much everyone is—then you'd be less involved if you didn't put yourself out there.

Do you think feeling compelled to post our lives up on social media constantly is damaging to our self-confidence? It seems that we only share the best parts of our lives, which, in my mind, creates a pretty unrealistic expectation—both for ourselves and others.
I would say that what you're observing is what I'm [seeing] with patients. I'll tell you an image that sticks with me: a two-year-old girl sitting on a parent's knee in an airport, and the parent is taking excessive photos and videos of her. It strikes me that kids nowadays are so often photographed and videoed from the earliest age that we [now] have a generation that is always on display. Far more than ever I was as a child.

When you were getting photographed back in the day, it was a big deal—it was a rare occurrence. You were thinking, Geez, I better look good. Now, it's done by you, your parents, your friends, by the unsuspecting stranger who [did it without your consent], all the time. There's an expected performance aspect that is a [bigger] part of our culture now. That's undeniable.

What impact is that having on our perception of ourselves?
I've heard people comment about this, that it's not about the experience you're having, but is rather more about capturing it and sending it to your friends so that they know you could be having that experience. It becomes the focus of the event and our lives. Rather than simply enjoying yourself in that moment, that moment is now for others to see.

I think of reality TV, because it's so closely tied to [social media]. What I see is that it's superficial. It's about what things look like, not about what they are. It's about what women are wearing, what they look like, the way they speak. We don't take it as real life—we see it as entertainment—but it ties into a [cultural desire] for it to be real. As you mentioned, it's about that portrayal—the highlight part of our lives—that we post online that makes it so difficult to discern.

It's probably always been the case in society that we've been navigating these [issues], but the power of technology and the scope to which they're' [used] makes it not even comparable now.

Using filters, taking more flattering photos, riskier photos—to me, it was about upping the ante and increasing attention. Why do we constantly crave attention from people through social media?
Bottom line is that, as human beings, we're all driven to be connected. As we develop through our life, those connections evolve and change, and as I mentioned, in adolescence, there's that need to fit into and get strength from our peer groups. There's less of a sense of, "I know who I am, I don't need to have this person's attention." There's a push and pull, and power to it, and now, you can gauge to what degree everybody is pulling in attention at. It can be enticing to compete.

But is that competition healthy to have at such a young age, especially when we have to oftentimes alter our image and presentation to get more of it?
The fact is that we invite our kids to be photographed—we are creating this. Our camera is always with us, and it's always on our kids. We're training them to be in pictures. You've had the experience of always being in the social media presence, and I can't imagine that. That would be so unbearably weighty. [My generation] didn't have that, and it's being thrust upon you guys abruptly.

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