Dress color debate: So, it is all in the head

You are most probably overwhelmed because of it, but this page won’t be about new media if we did not talk about it … you guessed it right; it is The Dress.
In mere hours, the Internet exploded with images of and discussions about a bride’s mother’s dress on the Scottish Isle of Colonsay. It might sound trivial and crazy, but that photo became the heart of heated debates involving science and the power of social media.
The science part is not yet concluded. People are going crazy over why the colors of the dress are being perceived differently by different people, and sometimes, by the same person on different occasions (personally, I have only seen it as a blue and black, my wife has seen all the possible combinations of colors!)
The best explanation that I have read so far was offered by Wired Magazine. You need to know the basics of biology on how we are able to see and how our brains are programmed or wired to interpret the bursts of lights they sense through the eyes. From there, it is only a matter of perception. It happens that this image “hits some kind of perceptual boundary” as the magazine describes it. The brain tries to discount the “illumination” part of the light and translate the rest into the colors of the “actual reflectance,” and that is why every other person is seeing the photo differently, our brain calculations are yielding different results.
“What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black,” he says to Wired Magazine.
But the science behind the color of the dress is not the reason it went viral, there is the “tornado” of social media that moved the photo around from Tumbler to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram. This tornado has left all what some people might call “important news” and focused its power on a photo of a dress!
Here, it is not a mere coincidence. According to a new study by University of Vermont and Mitre Corporation, “We use positive words more and overwhelmingly share positive stories over the negative news.”
That does not mean that people are not interested in following up “serious news,” the point is that what they are willing to share online, what they are connecting to, and engaging with are more positive and light hearted materials. That is what makes social media platforms … social in the first place.
Another study by BuzzSumo, a content discovery and measurement software company, led to the same conclusion, “The emotions that make a story go ‘viral’ are not fear and anger; they are awe, laughter and amusement.”
All this because of a photo of a dress taken on a small island … it is the days of social media.