What does Dressgate teach us?
Forgive me this week’s rather strange column. Truthfully, I’m using up a lot of brainpower right now thinking about the weird phenomena that is Dressgate, so I can’t imagine writing about anything else.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, no, Dressgate does not involve Monica Lewinsky. It’s much more innocent than that, plus more confounding. Dare I say world-rattling. And I’m not even exaggerating!
Here’s the background. At some time on Thursday, a young woman uploaded a picture of a dress — a pretty dress with alternating stripes of lace and satiny material — to the photo-sharing website Tumblr. Accompanying it was a plea: “[P]lease help me — is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking…out.” (Curse word redacted.)
The dress photo went viral, and eventually landed on my Facebook feed. Here, many of my intelligent, rational friends were engaged in a heated debate about the color of the dress, with each side feeling unequivocally correct about their own perception.
I looked at the photo from all angles, tried different lighting situations, but the result was always the same — the dress was clearly white and gold. Clearly. It was an objective fact for me. But then there were my friends, who felt just as strongly that the dress was, in fact, blue and black.
For an excruciating couple of hours, the Internet had no answers for why people were seeing the dress in different ways. Eventually, someone found the dress for sale online, and it was, without a doubt, a royal blue and inky black dress. White-and-gold believers started to panic. Are we going blind?!
When I was a kid, about 12 years old, my friend Lindsay and I got into a heated debate about color.
“What if the way you see colors and the way I see colors are different? What if this purple grape appears to me as your version of red? How would we ever know?” she said.
“Purple is purple,” I argued. “There’s no way it’s anything but purple.” I then explained that red and blue clearly combine to create purple. Therefore, purple is objective.
“But maybe my blue and your blue are different, too,” she rebutted.
We went on like this for a while, budding philosophers as we were. Finally, we agreed to disagree. Now I see she was right.
Since Thursday, many experts in vision, color theory, and the human brain have tackled Dressgate and explained, quite simply, that our perception of the world corresponds to our brains’ best guess about what it sees, not necessarily to the way things actually are. In other words, it’s an optical illusion of sorts.
It’s not a coincidence that I remember that 20-year-old conversation with Lindsay so vividly. Like Dressgate, it had me questioning the nature of perception and I believe to be true — a big thing for a 12-year-old.
As a human being, you count on certain facts being true. It’s a comfort. Like knowing the sky is blue. That temperatures over 90 degrees feel oven-hot, and temperatures below zero feel bitingly cold. That the way you see a photograph is the same way other people see a photograph.
If we can’t agree on these simple facts, how can we agree on anything else?
Well, that’s the thing. Maybe we can’t.
Zoom out a little bit and consider the dividing issues of our time. Abortion. Climate change. The existence of God. Does Obama love America, or not?
For those on either side, the answers seem so blindingly obvious, the other side must be either insane, deceived, or both.
Our brain is a complicated place, where everything is filtered through our own perceptions and the messages we pick up on. And to us, what we see feels like truth, even when it isn’t, necessarily.
But here is the other very strange part: as I sat down to write this column, I went back to the dress photo.
The very same photo I looked at yesterday and perceived so unequivocally as white and gold had changed. Now, the colors appeared more blueish and blackish. Not deep blue and ink black, granted, but much more blue and black than it appeared yesterday. It’s the same exact photo! It’s like a switch flipped in my brain and suddenly, I’m a blue-and-black believer.
And that’s a positive. Perhaps our powers of observation are objective, but also subject to change. We can see through another person’s eyes once in a while, if our brains make some key shifts.
Maybe, just maybe, the Dressgate dividing line of blue/black and white/gold will be the very thing that brings us together.
Jessica Vozel is originally from Perryopolis and, after attending graduate school and teaching in Ohio, now works as a freelance journalist and copywriter in the Pittsburgh area.