Photoshop Allows Us To Alter Our Memories 358
Anti-Globalism writes "In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was. It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that, said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole. What were doing, Mr. Johnson said, is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking. And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriends family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo. Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there."
meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had enough of theese "film-was-way-better" guys already.
Unperson (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't George Orwell warn us about trying to change our history? I'll keep my photographs as they are, thanks.
Re:meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure - but it is precisely the difference between it being a highly skilled task, and it being something anyone with a little experience using a graphics package can do, which is significant.
In the same light, you could hail email as being over-hyped since you could perform the same function with regular mail.
Making something a little bit easier can make it a lot more likely to adopted widely, and thus have interesting consequences.
There is real psychological truth to this (Score:5, Insightful)
http://abcnews.go.com/technology/story?id=98195&page=1 [go.com]
I love to cite this study whenever a decision is being made on the 'memory' of, say, a result - rather than an actual record.
There is another study, which I can't promply locate, in which subjects were shown several colors and then a day or two later, when asked to recall which colors they saw, they picked colors brighter and more saturated than those they had been shown.
This, to me, shows why the 'golden age' phenomenon is so prevalent.
Re:meh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, myself and an uncle were both added to a family photo taken around fifteen years ago, using those poor ol' analog techniques. I haven't asked any family members if they actually remember me being there, not that I think it matters either way. I highly doubt only digital manipulation is capable of also altering our memories. Our memories have always been a combination of what is remembered and what we're currently experiencing. If there's any difference, it would be that my family would remember not being able to get the family photo until my uncle and I were in town and able to go to the photographer's, then the added development time.
I think the biggest difference photoshop et. al. make is that they are vastly more accessible than the darkroom. You can do it at home, you don't have to be an expert to do a passable job. Thanks to Photoshop, Moe Szyslak wouldn't have to resort to pasting crude cut-outs of his head onto Homer and Marge's wedding album.
It's all big massive circle. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know all those ancient statues and such and sculptures made or those paintings by artists? Do you honestly think that everyone generally looked as good as the painting/statues? We've always done this. If anything because, I as the king/rich person would lop off some artist/sculpture's head if they didn't make me look good.
Move forward a few centuries and you've got household publishing with the internet/office apps. I wouldn't lop off the wife's or the kids' heads if they didn't make me look good in the family website or photo album, but we'd all pick the shots and photoshop what we can get away with to look our best. (The wife and kids have been taught what we think is decent taste in picking out photos and better pictures from a set so they should know better than posting poor pics.)
It's sort of like the concept of dressing up for photos. No one ever actually wears that sort of crap. It's only used to make you look as what the current culture set thinks presentable for art/photos/pictures is and that's it. (It's all rented or thrown away after that single use because you'd never wear it again.)
Digital vs. analoge photo's (Score:4, Insightful)
in a way, digital photography has taken things away from us.
Photo's used to be precious, they carried a real cost (film, development and printing), and because of that, you used to think about what was worth taking a picture of. Today, a cheap memory card will hold hundreds of photo's, and digital cameras are cheaper than decent quality analog camera's have ever been. It's nearly impossible to find a new cellphone without a (crappy) digital camera in it.
Because a digital photo carries practically no cost, people tend to be less thoughtful about what they take pictures of.
Already, I've found myself frustrated and drowning in thousands of mediocre pictures.
These pictures reside everywhere and nowhere; some are uploaded to various websites, others are emailed, yet others exist only on a hard drive and maybe a backup somewhere. The ease and low cost of copying should mean that shouldn't ever get lost, but in reality, they do get lost, hard drives crash, optical disks go bad, or they are just forgotten in a swamp of old files never to be found again.
There is something about a box full of old, fading photographs that digital photo's just can't offer.
And that's just assuming the photo's haven't been altered. With analog photo's, you could be reasonably sure they weren't faked, because it was fairly difficult and time consuming to fake an analog picture. With the digital ones, it gets easier all the time. What's the point of having a photo of something that didn't happen? You might as well watch a movie, that's not real either.
Ofcourse, I understand why a professional photographer would want to change a picture, for artistic reasons, or to remove something ugly from a picture, like a piece of trash in the background of your best wedding photo.
Re:Dangerous precedent (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the religion of Buddhism is based around the idea that reality is simply a delusion on the grandest scale and once you come to understand that you'll be at peace.
On the same subject, our economy is really based on illusion/delusions at the core of it. Money itself is inteself of non-intrisnic value. Well, to be fair... Even gold isn't really useful at the basic levels by itself. (Warren Buffet once joked why do value something that just gets dug up from a hole only to be buried in another somewhere in a bank.)
It is simply only valuable because everyone agrees it to be so. If no one agreed that your money or gold was valuable then you just have unusable matter sitting there.
In the same aspect, all our social interactions and business dealings are based around perception. TV commercials are the best example of why this works the way it does. If you can make people believe in something, to them it is true.
If you have control of this perception then you can make people do as you please... Which I think 1984 was trying to point out to us. Its not about just rewriting history but the perception of people on reality.
Everything old is new again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about portrait paintings that were all the rage for many hundreds of years before cameras were invented. The portraits were not usually exact recreations of what the painter saw. Usually, the subject was altered slightly to make them look 'better' (more conforming to the beauty ideals of the time period). The person was usually given clothes, jewelery, and surroundings that were prettier than reality (possibly more extravagant than they could really afford). These portraits were not really meant to capture reality: they were meant as a statement (usually "look how important I am", but perhaps also "this is what's meaningful/important to us").
Old photographs were mostly "staged" (especially really old ones where people had to hold still for them), so it's not like they were faithful reflections of reality, either.
Digitally altered images are similar. People are altering the photos to capture something. Not reality. But rather a statement they want to make, like "look how much fun that day was" or "look how beautiful I am" or "look how much I love you" or whatever.
I'm not going to pass a value judgment on whether this trend is "good" or "bad". Rather I will note a few things:
1. As computer power increases, automated "adjustment" of photos is likely to become more common. (Everything from relatively benign red-eye-removal and HDR [wikipedia.org] tweaking, to more drastic things like automatically making people look prettier [slashdot.org].)
2. It may be that only for a thin slice of history were the majority of photos "real"--in the time period where photography was fast and cheap enough to snap "candid shots" but before photo-manipulation was fast and cheap enough to alter them.
3. Despite all this modification, I'm sure plenty of "real" photos will remain--journalists, historians, and even normal folk will still be inclined to archive unmodified pictures. Especially with storage costs dropping, keeping the raw image files (before manipulation) will likely continue. In fact I would hope that future image formats would maintain an internal undo history, where the original photo-data remains.
Re:meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
What i mean is that suddenly many old-time photographers point out to retouching as being the evil which will destroy "the essence of photography" when those techniques had been applied for ages.
Re:It's all great till you don't exist (Score:3, Insightful)
Burning of the Library of Alexandria, the Witch Scare of the middle ages, Shakespeare's re-write of British history in Macbeth...
"I have ancient proof that space aliens wrote the Declaration of Independence, That Howard Hughes wrote a will, that Elvis had a love child with _____ fill in bimbo du jours.. oh and do be careful, the ink's not quite dry"..
Changing our collective memory is nothing new.
This has long been the case (Score:3, Insightful)
Personal "photographic records" have always told a more perfect story.
For one, how many of us photograph our dreary work lives? From looking at my photo album, one would think I do nothing but roam the exotic corners of the Earth. (Which is not the case, I assure you).
Furthermore, I personally toss out the photos in which I'm looking stupid, drooling, spilling my beer on myself or caught ogling cleavage. So the "photographic record" of myself has always been some shiny, respectable version of reality.
We humans love to represent reality with a positive spin. It's what we do. It's the same reason we wear clothes.
Move along. Nothing new here.
Re:meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep diaries of my holidays. I'm certain that without the diaries, there's stuff I'd forget that I wanted to remember. I know this because if I write the diary a day late, I already struggle to remember details and have to ask people ("Where was it we had lunch yesterday?").
So what would happen if I put a minor untruth in there - a distortion perhaps? Maybe I wouldn't read it until 10 years later, when I'll forget that I lied, combine my lie with my hazy real memories, and end up remembering the lie as truth.
how is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
The technology is different sure, but Photoshop has had the ability to do this for years.
THIS IS NOT, IN ANY WAY, NEWS.
Slashdot gets more and more like Digg every day. Please, please stop this trend.
Not New Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually this isn't new. Doctors have found that it's fairly easy to manipulate memories with photos [findcounseling.com] and there is the development of drugs [go.com] used to treat PTSD and other victims to erase or lessen traumatic memories.
What was scary was, a few years back, I saw on TV where they took a classroom of kids, made up a scenario--soon the kids believed that scenario happened to them personally.
I have a big problem with this science. While I understand wanting to help victims that might become suicidal, I have a problem with manipulating someone's memory just as I would shooting them up with mind-numbing drugs so they don't feel anything. I think working through the incident would make you far more stronger than taking a pill to blank it out.
Re:meh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah - you mean the "What I'm comfortable with, should be the boundary of human progress" thought process?
Re:meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
What i mean is that suddenly many old-time photographers point out to retouching as being the evil which will destroy "the essence of photography" when those techniques had been applied for ages.
Retouching IS an evil which destroys the essence of photography. It's about capturing reality, not presenting an ideal.
Thing is, most people don't care about the essence of photography. They just want to remember events in their lives. I think we're both in agreement that there is nothing wrong with this outlook. It's perfectly OK.
It's the same with anything that is artistic expression. The average person doesn't really care the type of paints or style, reproduction or original.... they just want a painting that looks nice on their wall. They don't care about vox-boxes and pitch correction and voice-doubling, they just want music to which they can work out or drive to work.
Let the purists have their purity, and let the pragmatists have their pragmatism. The nice part about technology is that both can coexist peacefully, ignoring a the artistic equivalent of "get off my lawn."
Re:Digital vs. analoge photo's (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology always "takes stuff away", but the entire reason we pursue it is that it gives more stuff back.
Yes, I am "deprived" from my connection with Mother Earth because I am not a subsistence farmer, but I am happy that I don't have to spend a lot of time hungry or worrying about food, and it's my responsibility to plow the resulting freed time into something useful.
Yes, I am socially deprived because I am no longer economically forced to live with my extended family, but in turn, I get to form social links of my own choosing. It's my own damn fault if I don't take advantage of the superior options that opens up.
Yes, making photos easy cheapens each given photo, but it also makes it easier to experiment without blowing a wad. I didn't even bother with an analog camera because I wasn't willing to put the time in to learn, let alone spend the money, but with my digital camera I've learned a lot because I can take twenty pictures of the same thing with near-immediate feedback, and virtually no cost. If you don't end up with a superior photo collection in the end, that's your fault, not the technologies; all the tech did was make it cheaper and easier to end up with that result.
When someone pisses and moans like you do, my answer is that the fault lies with you, twofold: First, you need to take advantage of what is offered rather than bitching about it, and second, you need to stop bitching about other people perhaps taking advantage of the new ease-of-use to do things that you don't approve of, which gets nothing more than a BFD from me. Other people taking bad photos does not diminish your life, and it enriches theirs, especially since the alternative is not going to be "spending years learning to take photos" but "not taking photos at all".
Stop whining, reach out, and take advantage of life! There's so much stuff to do and all that worldview will do is make you miserable amongst abundance!
How to prove anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you as regards purely artistic photography. Plenty of the techniques there - fish-eye lenses, long or multiple exposures, colored lenses, etc - already distort reality for artistic purposes.
What I wonder is this: is there a way to take photos as reliable documentary evidence anymore? How can you prove that something has not been altered?
Re:Digital vs. analoge photo's (Score:5, Insightful)
Skill and Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Now you can produce high quality color photos quickly and cheaply, so many more people get to play.
The lower financial barrier plus the removal of the necessity to make space for all that equipment and chemicals must have at least as much to do with the increase in photo alteration as any skill differences.
Re:Digital vs. analoge photo's (Score:3, Insightful)
Although somewhat true, I have literally dozens of boxes of old photos and slides from my grandparents, mostly of the most mundane-looking scenes. Clearly the expense (my grandparents in no way counted as wealthy) and time didn't keep them from clicking away furiously while on vacation.
I do, however, have to agree with you, in part... Thanks to having each picture basically "free" on a modern digital, with near-infinite capacity, I'll snap off a 3-burst at just about anything that even vaguely interests me. As a result, I have a far lower ratio of "good" pictures overall, but a much, much higher ratio of truly stunning ones. While in all those boxes I've found perhaps ten that elicit a "wow" of awe, on my last vacation alone I managed perhaps twice that many.
Already, I've found myself frustrated and drowning in thousands of mediocre pictures.
Yes, the ease of shooting off 300 pictures means you have plenty of crap to go through at the end of the day... But thanks to the ease not only of taking those pictures, but of viewing and deleting them, I can go through the whole lot in under ten minutes.
And as for drowning in thousands of them - Delete the crap! Simple as that. If you take a burst, only keep the best of the group. If you take something blurry, gone. If you take 50 shots of the same whale only to notice later that you can't tell it from a bit of driftwood, delete the whole lot of 'em (except perhaps one to make fun of). You can think of it as a sort of "composition after the fact" - Shoot first and ask questions later.
There is something about a box full of old, fading photographs that digital photo's just can't offer.
Yeah - Dust. Lots of it.
Re:It's all big massive circle. (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm... You seem to live a very different life to me. Never in my life have I even considered dressing up specifically for a photo in clothes that I will wear once and then throw away, or even just clothes I wouldn't normally wear.
Admittedly, I am a bit of a trollface, and I always look awful in photos, so maybe there is something to this whole 'shallowness' angle you're pushing.
I was thinking of crap my mom made us dress up in growing up mostly. But haven't you been in a wedding party, funeral, high school/college graduation, or heck baby shower? O.k. baby showers don't require new clothes, but the clothes that the baby gets are of the let's dress 'em up cute and take pics variety. Didn't you have a year book where you had 2-3 pictures? Didn't you have "picture day"? O.k. Picture Day you'd wear what you'd normally wear, but in high school we had glamor shots. Trust me there were lots of one time or limited time outfits there. How about prom?
I've only had to wear a suit for a job interviews and getting married in. (Which was a different fancier rental suit.) Did your wife buy, borrow, or rent her wedding dress or how about bridesmaids dresses?
How about Halloween or Christmas? I bet you've bot something or see people go out to buy something just to where for that holiday. Now a days, there are several one day use reasons for clothing. O.k. if you wanna be cheap or don't do that holiday/event than you can skip out on the expense.
If it's your event though, you'll be expected to dress the part though rather or not you really want to. If you doubt me, try to get married in what you'd wear to work every day. You'd be vetoed by your future wife, your mother, your future mother-in-law, and then various guests that are in on the planning.
Now no one says that you have to dress up for something, but if you throw some event/party then some forms of dressing up may be required and expected of the hosts and the guests. No one says that your guests have to attend your event, but some things they'll have to go to if they are really socially tied to you or you happen to be their boss.
Re:Dangerous precedent (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree on the money but not the gold. Due to it's unique properties (malleability, ductility, conductivity, etc) gold has utility value, in other words you can use it for things (it's also shiny and pretty). Additionally, it's relatively rare, which increases it's value.
Well this might be off topic, but I agree with Warren Buffet personal views. For industrial and manufacturing uses, silver is a better commodity.
Secondly, gold itself doesn't do anything useful. It doesn't earn you interest and it doesn't exactly beat inflation like the stock market. If you look at inflation, gold was worth way more in 1980 than it was now. (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gold_price.png">source)
And if there was a societal collapse like some gold bugs claim, I would think guns, water, and canned food would be more valuable than gold.
Well... If you had guns you could simply just take the gold from the people who didn't have guns after all.
Again, this all about perception and keeping up illusions. If you can make someone believe what you own is valuable, you can make them put forth effort in order to get what you have into their possession.
If you make someone have a false memory of wanting or liking something you can really make them do as you please.
Re:How to prove anything? (Score:1, Insightful)
You could digitally sign it with a certificate built into the camera and that uses a secure timestamp from a trusted source.
Re:meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most basic economic truth, sad to say, of the last 100 years, seems to be that Convenience Trumps All.
You're quoting something more pervasive - the path of least resistance, emergence and evolution.
their favorite medium, replaced by something of inferior quality but greater convenience
"As so it once was, as much as it can never be again" - our challenge is to not weep over technology which can and will not survive in our current and future environment, but to find new ways to use new technology to perform those functions better. If we - the old - refuse, the next generation will happily take up that challenge.
Convenience Wins. Of course some might mention this in terms of Linux/Windows but I won't go into that..
I think it's apt - isn't this what the whole "Linux Desktop" conversation is about? When it becomes more convenient to use Linux, than Windows, then the latter will become obsolete.
As long as you keep it to yourself (Score:2, Insightful)
Methinks you're too optimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it did so already several times. Admittedly, not during the lifetimes of those involved, but 2000 years later you get a list of Pharaohs where Horemheb follows directly after Amenhotep III. (Hint: there's more than one missing there.) And you take it seriously. Heck, it doesn't even take that long. A mere couple hundred years after the fact, Egyptian historians themselves were compiling lists of Pharaohs with the same missing names and not noticing anything funny about them. I doubt that it was pure conspiracy and with everyone knowing that they're faking history.
Plus, I think that Orwell's point wasn't that you can get people to suddenly forget, but that you can get everyone to play along and shut up. And that they could and did before. Even if you're sure you saw Comrade Yezhov together with Comrad Stalin (to use a real historical example), you keep your mouth shut because you don't fancy a visit from the NKVD. A generation later, already kids are learning a history without Yezhov, and nobody bothers telling them otherwise. The Damnatio Memoria is now complete. Or conversely more than one dictator manufactured a revolutionary history for himself, and placed himself in photos of fights and protests he wasn't actually present at. A generation later, and maybe a purge or two of those who are actually in a position to say he wasn't there, and that has just become history.
Actually, I doubt that many people realize it as clear as you claim. Most people, especially from cultures which heavily faked history, just think that their version is right and everyone _else_ is biased or lying.
Look no further than the Eastern Bloc, where ancient border disputes were exaggerated and occasionally even fictionalized, to keep people's attention focused on those instead of on the present-day internal problems. You know, keep them thinking "OMG, country X is teh enemy because they took one of our provinces 1000 years ago!" instead of looking at who's having a more immediate and substantial impact upon their standard of living. _Especially_ countries which, honestly, had just gotten some province as reward after WW1 or WW2, invented elaborate layers of rationales as to why it was always theirs anyway.
I don't think most of those, even history teachers, actually knew that they're teaching a faked or biased history. Nor that they'd think, basically, "I wouldn't use a history book from country X because their bias is different from ours and it wouldn't sell." They thought more along the lines of "OMG, the people from country X are a bunch of evil liars! They still teach that province Y was originally theirs! They even print historical maps where it's painted as theirs!" (Never mind that at that point in history it actually was "theirs".)
Or as other examples, look at how the Crusades are perceived differently by different people. Or how Napoleon is a national hero to the French and almost an archvillain for some other people. Etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the whole point about having a bias is that you're unaware of it. You don't think "man, I'm from country X, I guess I have no choice but to be biased against country Y. Let's see which history books fit my bias." If you can think in those terms, you're already unbiased and rational about it. Being biased is more like already knowing something to be true, and looking for the sources that fit that pre-defined truth.
Re:meh... (Score:1, Insightful)
obviously if the poster has to ask where he had lunch yesterday, he has gone beyond the occassional note taking and post-it reminders. Obviously "lunch yesterday" is a significant event and not just "daily life" because he was referring to journaling during his "holidays" (vacations to most Americans). Vacations are usually not taken at home (although stay-cations are popular this year thanks to increased travel costs), so meals usually involve a decision process (What's good around here? How do I get there? Do they take Brand X credit card? etc.) If the effort spent isn't enough to remember it a day later, there are likely memory issues (or alcohol)./i.
That's ridiculous. If I have lunch somewhere while I'm on vacation, I'm somewhere that I'm not familiar with. I probably ate someplace because I was passing by and it looked good, or because someone recommended it and gave me directions (go down three blocks, turn right). When I want to write it down, I will remember the decor, the service, and the quality of the food, but I'm not going to remember the name of the place or the cross streets it was on, particularly if they are in a foreign language. And I'm sure that's the kind of detail the poster needed help with after day. Not remotely an indication of a memory problem.
Re:meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably can still tell (Score:4, Insightful)
Also though, to get around the deterioration of the
tl;dr - Those are only follies that someone who wasn't a professional would fall prey to. Any digital professional would bypass all of those simply due to how he went about doing his job.