How 25 years of Photoshop changed the way we see reality
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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 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.
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.
Their competitor companies complained to the advertising regulator and now digitally enhanced eyelashes have to be declared in the ad.
It'd be great to see similar declarations for any digitally created content in adverts.
"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!!)
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-...
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...
"A Conversation with John Knoll"
http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410...
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.
What could/would be a solution?
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'm definitely open to suggestions!
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.
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.
"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."
"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."
I wouldn't. Not in this case, anyway. The picture on the right is utterly unappealing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyCmIH06rQE - "Quantel DPB 7001 Paintbox - 1981"
How Did They Do To Make Us Behave Like This??