Blogger reveals her faked trip to Disney
I keep saying to myself: it’s kind of fun to do the impossible. Life is what you make it! Carolyn Stritch
HOW far would you go to create your “perfect self ” on social media?
That was the question asked by a North East blogger when she faked an entire trip to Disneyland.
University of Sunderland student Carolyn Stritch managed to fool her 190,000 followers in a bid to show just how filtered and photoshopped social media can be.
Carolyn, from Newcastle, pretended she was celebrating her 22nd birthday with a trip to California.
In fact, the photography video and digital imaging student is 32 years old and was miles away from the sunshine state.
She had simply used Photoshop to cut out her body from a photograph taken in the cold North East of England and imposed it on a picture in Disneyland, California, she found on the web.
Alongside descriptions of what she was doing, Carolyn posted a picture of herself appearing to stand in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. The picture received more than 18,000 likes.
Carolyn, who posts under @theslowtraveler, wrote: “I’ve taken myself off to California.
“There I am in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle – my crazy, selfindulgent 22nd birthday present to myself.
“Tomorrow I’ll be back home and it’ll be like it never even happened! I keep saying to myself: it’s kind of fun to do the impossible. Life is what you make it!”
She later came clean on her blog in a post titled “Why I hacked my own Instagram account”, explaining that she wanted to see just how far she could create an entire story using photo editing apps – and whether anyone would notice.
Carolyn said: “I came up with a story: my FaceApped perfect self, who’s 10 years younger than I am, flies off to Disneyland for the day, and somehow manages to photograph herself all alone in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.
“I manipulated images, captioned them with a fictional narrative, and presented them as reallife.”
Carolyn kicked off the project by using FaceApp to manipulate an image of herself sitting in bed, captioning the image as if she were about to head off to California.
She said she was “horrified” when she saw her new face, but even her own mum didn’t question the image, assuming instead that her daughter had simply “gotten really good” at make-up.
Professor Arabella Plouviez, academic dean for the faculty of arts and creative industries at the University of Sunderland, said: “Carolyn has really provoked some interesting debate through her ‘hacking her own Instagram’ stream. This is not about tricking people but rather about revealing something about our relationship with the digital world.”