Brenden Matthews

Images are interesting because, in the digital world, it’s trivial to alter them, and yet we still tend to treat images—photographs, video—as a kind of proof. If you see a photograph in a news article, most people don’t really stop to ask whether the thing actually happened. The photograph is the thing, or at least it stands in for it. Light hit something, a camera was there, therefore this event occurred. That association feels almost automatic, and it’s been reinforced culturally for a long time.

If a “true” self exists at all, it probably only appears when no one is watching. The rest of the time, we’re adapting to context. At work, we perform the professional self. With friends, we’re relaxed, funny, interesting. With family, something else entirely. Online, where the audience is abstract and potentially infinite, we often project an idealized version of ourselves—the highlight reel.

What exactly does it mean to be present? It’s a question I’ve written about before, yet here I am again—writing another version of it. Maybe that’s the point. Presence isn’t something you figure out once and move on from. It’s a practice, a remembering. It’s a tricky concept—hard to describe, slippery to pin down. Presence seems to have layers. But maybe the best way to understand what presence is is to first talk about what it isn’t.

I’ve been thinking about when I first fell in love with computers. It started early—somewhere around the third or fourth grade. Our first family computer was a 486, running some version of Windows and, more importantly, MS‑DOS. I remember typing random commands into that black screen, trying to make sense of it. I wasn’t very good at it, but it felt like magic.

Kindness and niceness aren’t the same thing. This may sound like I’m splitting hairs, but once you notice the difference it’s hard to unsee. I first bumped into this idea through the New York stereotype—how people who don’t live here love to say New Yorkers are rude. I don’t buy it. New Yorkers just have a different concept of what counts as rude.