AME Homework 3

I was there, just ask Photoshop

Image altering has become so easy to do and so ubiquitous in the last decade that it finally has been accepted in to contemporary family ideals. Poor "photoshopping" jobs are still frowned upon or even laughed at by some blogs, but most people just accept that photoshop and other image editing software has been fully integrated into our society. People have adapted to photoshop, taking every celebrity photograph with a grain of salt, fully knowing that the model or actor has been digitally slimmed down and toned. With even non-famous people using photoshop for their own altercation needs, it's only a matter of time until people will start judging photos on how well they looked but how good of a job the retoucher did.


Photography as a Weapon

Humans use up to fifty percent of their brain just processing visual information and a large amount of that is very emotional to us. A single image can provoke more rage, more nostalgia than any single sentence or any single paragraph can. Long passages of time are condensed into just a few images: an entire childhood summarized by a photograph of a naive toddler on a bike or an entire war symbolized by one image of a napalmed scarred bystander. With photoshop becoming common place in just about any digital image nowadays, it's becoming harder to identify what truly is fake, with nothing to compare fake images to except other fake images. Now the photoshop battlefield has become more dangerous to societies, where almost anything can be forged and set upon entire countries. Any emotion can be elicit with just a deft hand a cloning stamp.

The Ethics of Digital Manipulation

Just the phrase digital manipulation sounds malicious to most people, but the manipulation of photographs is not a recent discovery and is not always an unethical practice. Photo manipulation started almost immediately with photography and is only unethical in certain circumstances. When used for artwork, any all artwork is fair game as long as it's for the purpose of making something look more aesthetically appealing but as soon as something is not supposed to be known as manipulated, then the shades of gray start to creep up around the ethics of manipulation. If a magazine cover model is made to look more attractive, is it wrong when it's used to sell more copies? Photo manipulation is only wrong when the audience feels maliciously deceived. The creator can never decide when the manipulation is wrong, only the audience can.

No Time to Think

This entire video was just a little too slow. It really only has one point to make and it takes too long to get there. What I got from this is that people have been able to creatively think in times of crises, the limiting factor has always been technology and how effectively people can record their creativity, but up until recently, technology has finally become accessible and smart enough so that the only limiting factor now is our own imaginations. In this age, people can now let creativity find themselves and not have to worry about making their dreams a reality.

Reboot

Let me start of by saying that I was barely able to finish this. Sterling seems capable of only talking in metaphor and fails to make his point clear. In addition to only eluding to vague new ideas that we currently have no way of imagining, Sterling is a complete cynic. This is honestly very depressing. All I can gather from this is that technology is not so much as advancing the human race, but pulling in back into a technological darkness where humanity is destroyed by it's own innovativeness, which makes no sense to me seeing as how technology has only helped in the past hundred years. Sterling, practice speeches.