I have to laugh at the quote of someone referring to "the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied." Before Photoshop there was forced perspective, soft-focus filters, control over lighting (what's with that leaked photo of Cindy Crawford? It shows her in literally the worst light possible, to emphasize every wrinkle, sag, and every bit of cellulite) and other ways to get the image one wants, and those techniques are still around. The camera records what light hits it, but the lies can occur well before that point.
I have always been personally bothered by the way images are photoshopped to the extreme. For me, it feels fraudulent to have an advertisement of a product and use an image that has been doctored. I mean, we can think of a whole spectrum of this phenomenon that an increasing number of people would be uncomfortable with:
A photo of a mountain scenery published only for art's sake.
A magazine cover of a woman with a few scrapes from a car accident photoshopped out.
A makeup ad with a woman's wrinkles and blemishes photoshopped out, instead of adequetly concealed by their product.
A diet product with before and after photos doctored to show the customers thinner.
A hotel ad with an ocean view, which is actually photoshopped. The actual view is 50% obscurred by a building.
Read these examples and consider your feeling of discomfort with each. I think there is a sliding scale of 'wrongness' when using Photoshop and IMHO if a photo is used for an ad, it should have a disclaimer if any digital manipulation was used.
I started using Photoshop when I was maybe 12 years old. I learned to be skeptical of every image, every advertisement, and there is so much more psychology, philosophy and art theory I could go into. I am 'female' and I grew up thinking the Photoshopped pictures of myself on social sites were the 'right' pictures, the 'right' self. To put a long story short, an eating disorder very mildly describes the kind of maladaptive clash I experienced between my physical form and my intellectual one.
I imagine the same thing happened when journalism was revealed to be yellow journalism, and other technologies slowly reveal their effect through generational adaptation.
In one sense, it's the same thing that happens because of the cycles of birth and death; technologies and cultures are born, and they are subject to death too. It's not surprising, but it is surprising, because the stuff that changes is not always the stuff you expect to change. In another sense, it's screwed up, and the only thing I can really hope for is that some kind of overarching balance can be intelligently directed towards and balance can be achieved. The idea that this is actually progress, and not just yet another side of the same coin that will eventually flip again.
I agree with the dissonance between physical and psychological self you mentioned and it's great that you have achieved that insight. Unfortunately, it seems like most people do not understand this dichotomy and there are also many (maybe the majority?) who do not understand how commonly images are photoshopped to be almost unrecognizable from their original.
There's little point to understanding it unless it affects you. Most people think things don't affect them, and sometimes it can seem like just thinking about it can make it affect you when it didn't affect you before. Even I suggest I have a higher level of skepticism than the norm. But I can't really measure that without affecting my level of skepticism. So my psychological understanding might be high right now, but my logical correctness and scientific methodology are probably reduced.
This might have made me upset when I still had my eating disorder, but otherwise I chalk it up to a habit of complaining. The other insight I guess is that people can have correct, rapid switching thoughts and ideas that continuously contradict one another until they achieve a kind of abstract balance.
To me it's one form of maturation. Other people could experience the same thing without the capacity to verbally express it. They may have the insight without the words.
I agree.
Your comment made me think about how images are perceived by our brains, we humans see very very tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and its fascinating to see us create tools that can tweak what we can see by manipulating features on photos. Maybe unrelated, but definitely worth taking a step back and realize how little we are, how little we know, how little we see, and how much we mess with whatever little we know and see.
Doesn't have to be Photoshop taking out the wrinkles or taking off the inches. Note the serious difference in lighting between the before and after photos for cosmetics, or the way that in the after photos for weight loss the subjects pose with their torsos at an angle to the camera to look thinner.
Many years ago, I remember being absolutely enthralled by learning about how the first version of Photoshop was developed by the brothers, John and Thomas Knoll, in Dr. Dobb's Magazine.
"Tom is really a super programmer. He's one of the best engineers I know. He just wrote this terrific, great code."
"It became much bigger than we thought it would, but it kept getting better and better."
The original source code (thank you, Computer History Museum!!)
One of the characteristics of brilliant engineers (and engineering teams of the likes of Jeff Dean's) may be that that they create the opposite of technical debt as they work...
> From the time he decided to stop school until Version 1.0 shipped was almost two years. It became much bigger than we thought it would, but it kept getting better and better.
Tom is really a super programmer. He's one of the best engineers I know. He just wrote this terrific, great code.
Version 1.0 was a usable tool largely because I was trying to use it to solve real-world problems. I would run into something that would just stymie me. There's got to be a way of doing this, and then Tom would scratch his head and go, "That would be hard." He would think about it a while. I would talk to him a few days later and he would say, "I was thinking about that and I had this great idea."
I was goading him a little bit, too. I would say, "You know what I really want to do? I want to make one of these selections so that I can like select some area and then the paint only affects just the area selected." Tom would say, "Oh, thats going to be impossible to make that go real time. It's going to be really slow." I'd say "Oh, come on, Tom. I'll bet you can do that." About a week later he would say, "I was thinking about it, and I think I've got a way." It was often a whole lot of exchanges like that where at first Tom thought it would be really hard, but he would keep thinking about it. He's brilliant that way, and he would come up with a clever solution to the problem...
It is very important to remember, particularly to those of us who "live" online, that all news and entertainment media -- not just static images, but video, audio, text, human interactions -- are tightly controlled, manipulated, and very often scripted.
Photoshop may be the poster child, but this is a much bigger problem than one piece of software. Social Media seems to be taken as unassailable fact by the press, and those "facts" from a fake world are then seemingly used to justify actions taken in the real world.
Damned near no one seems to care the emperor has no clothes -- and this puff piece does little to address the actual ramifications of living this way -- not so long as they're getting their tweets and instagrams.
all news and entertainment media -- not just static images, but video, audio, text, human interactions -- are tightly controlled, manipulated, and very often scripted.
I obviously don't have a silver bullet. Some steps I've personally taken include things like canceling television service and canceling subscriptions to infotainment publications, whether in print or online. I've taken steps to minimize the number of distractions I'm forced to deal with, and don't participate in _most_ social media. For me, these distractions amount to enough mental noise that I have a hard time thinking critically about anything beyond my job. Without them, I've found numerous benefits, not the least of which is the ability to think more clearly and decide for myself whether a news item passes the smell test. I would advocate everyone at least try this. I suspect you'll find you have way more free time than you think, and the mental quiet will do most people some amount of good.
These personal steps don't really do anything to curb the actions of others. Frankly, I just don't have any solid solutions to offer. You can't legislate this sort of thing. It might be possible to break up some large media conglomerates under anti-trust laws, but given the amount of control the current media have to control the conversation, that seems like a non-starter to me. Ending the 24-hour news cycle would help too -- but again, there's a market, it exists, and we can't just wave a magic wand to get rid of it.
I think it's possible that the infotainment industry could atrophy and die off given enough lack of interest or enough obvious outright lying that their credibility becomes laughable. (As an aside, I've found the reaction of NBC to Brian Williams' "big fish" stories to be just perfect. Can't let the head news anchor call the whole operation's credibility into question, and so the punishment was predictably harsh.) I don't see that death as even remotely imminent.
I too have no active social media accounts save HN. I do try to read thing critically, but I do not have enough knowledge to do so. I have no interest in, and do not follow news, but I must admit this is not the way of a citizen.
Could a Wikipedia for news be a solution? But even then, it is very easy for a few to come together and hijack the thread.
> The problem is that 25 years after Photoshop launched, we’d much prefer manipulations of reality to reality itself.
That photoshoped picture of Beyonce could be easily achieved in 'reality' as well. Photographers and make-up artists have many tricks.
This sort of celebrity is probably paid thousands dollars per minute and its cheaper to photoshop her, than pay her for 2 hours to apply 1 mm layer of make up.
The quoted part reminds me of what's known as 'staged authenticity' in tourism studies.
"Dean MacCannell formulates his theory of modern tourism and approaches the question of authenticity in The Tourist. He uses the concept of staged authenticity to explain the tourist experience; people know what they are experiencing is not real and authentic but feel content with it anyway. According to MacCannell, staged authenticity is authenticity’s negation, an attempt to move beyond the front-back binary made famous by Erving Goffman, very much similar to what Edward Bruner, also hoping to transcend such binaries as authentic – inauthentic and front – back, wrote in Culture on tour.
To Goffman, all social action is play, and he uses theater as an analogy when he explains how people will alter their social roles according to their position (front or back) on the stage. The idea of people necessarily withholding some aspects of their personality will ultimately lead to a position where the tourist is always confronted with a staged play, never allowed backstage to experience authenticity. Bruner and MacCannell have, however, different ideas about what is to be found backstage. For MacCannell the back is a place where secrets are only popularly thought to be kept but, in fact, do not exist. While MacCannell explicitly denies the possibility of authenticity residing in the back regions, Bruner stated that MacCannell believes there is always true and real at the back."
Also reminds me of an article about the Cloverfield movie (can't find it right now). They made the head of the Liberty Statue on the actual size it would be when cut by the monster and falling among people in the streets. But the feedback from a closed beta exhibition showed that audience would find find that "small" head comically ridiculous and inaccurate. So for the film release they made it much bigger so people would find it realistic.
"How does media authoring software shape the media being created, making some design choices seem natural and easy to execute, while hiding other design possibilities? How does media viewing / managing / remixing software affect our experience of media and the actions we perform on it? How does software change what 'media' is conceptually?
"This article approaches some of these questions via the analysis of a software application that has become synonymous with 'digital media' – Adobe Photoshop."
Sigh. The title made me think this could have been a great article, but it was just a puff piece about some reactions of women to finding out that photos get retouched. No examining how photoshop alters our view of reality, no thoughts about how this might shift what is normal, no insights into potential backlashes and what we might do as a society to fight this, no consideration to how this affects women of color or (gasp) men. Just a few words and links showing that photos get retouched and that this is bad for women? I'm not sure, the author never really makes any point.
