Unreal Perfection

[computerex]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Technology makes it extremely easy to manipulate visuals. For instance, fashion magazines airbrush away physical imperfections from physiognomies as a matter of business. Words are edited, and cut all the time. Why may the manipulation of visuals be particularly troubling?[/FONT]

 

[willy88]

People may think videos like this are real:

(embedding disabled)

In fact, it's completely computer generated.

 

[n0mad23]

This is a trick question, right?

Seriously, you raise an interesting issue for several reasons. We in the west place particular emphasis on the visual sense, often at the expense of the other ones. Last semester I used George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" to get to the heart of the importance of language, and the "traps and pitfalls" of language corrupting thought and vice versa. To my amazement and chagrin, not one of my students had ever heard of "Big Brother" outside of the reality TV show. To them, Big Brother is a good thing - because if you're on TV, you're Real. Without this mediated experience, reality itself might be a hallucination.

Consider body image issues in our society. Eating disorders are completely jacked into the visual experience. Pornography also moves a multi-sensual experience into one primarily of vision.

Then consider the fact that verbal agreements are worth nothing if there's a written document involved. All of these examples are in fact examples of the manipulation of visual images, though outside the context of your example.

You've opened an interesting can of worms here, Computerex. One for me that's particularly interesting and significant.

 

[ar81]

The difference between good an evil is a matter of values.
Evil in my view is what causes harm to people.

 

[computerex]

T
Consider body image issues in our society. Eating disorders are completely jacked into the visual experience. Pornography also moves a multi-sensual experience into one primarily of vision.

It is now mandatory for freshmen to take a class known as "HOPE" and "Team Leadership". A large part of these classes relate to personal image. In HOPE we learned about pretty much every eating disorder, and there are many. You are definitely correct when you say how much emphasis is put on appearance, otherwise we wouldn't have so many bulimic students in my school.

This is supposed to be a class activity, to have a discussion about this very question. This community is rather technologically educated, so I thought what you guys might think about this. I am looking forward to seeing more replies, it would be excellent if you guys could put your thoughts here.

 

[tblaxland]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Why may the manipulation of visuals be particularly troubling?[/FONT]

I think it is an issue of trust between the publisher of an image and the observer. For a long time it was very difficult to modify a photo/video with enough fidelity to convince a observer that what they were seeing was unedited. This leads to observers being predisposed to believe that what they are seeing is real and hence they find themselves troubled when viewing an altered image. The unease is further amplified if there is information external to the image that hints at the image being unedited. Through personal experience, I find myself looking at most images with scepticism in regards to their veracity.

Visuals are just one way we humans obtain our information about the world around us and it is important to realise that. Notwithstanding, there is a tendency to place a high weighting on the value of the information in a visual because it is such a dense format, ie, a lot of information can be gleaned in a small space and time. The saying "A picture says a thousand words is an example of this. This high weighting make the betrayal of an observer's trust that much more acute.

 

[Andy44]

For humans, eyesight is the primary sense. We use it for communication, navigation, learning, pleasure, everything. We don't have strong sense of smell like dogs and cats, we don't feeling whiskers, and even our hearing, which is vital and quite versatile, is less sensitive then that of many animals, and degrades as we age. Eyesight is everything for humans. Blind people get by, of course, but with difficulty.

Manipulate what people see, and you've got the keys to the kingdom. Public opinion can be easily swayed by controlling what is seen and what is hidden on television, in movies, newspaper photos, internet, the list goes on. As the old saw goes: a picture is worth a thousand words.

How fast do you think it would take the public to put an end to the war in Iraq if, after every accidental or negligent homocide of a woman or a child by friendly fire, photos of torn and mangled bodies were shown in western media? These photos do exist, but they are not shown, and for a reason. Those in charge remember how photos of the consequences of their decisions undermined support for the Vietnam war. Recall the photo of the naked little girl running from her village with napalm burns on her skin. Or the film of the South Vietnam officer summarily executing a suspected NVA spy on a city street by simply walking up to him and firing a revolver into his head, and the blood shooting forth from the wound as the handcuffed man fell dead. Such images don't show the whole story, but serve to shock you into seeing one powerful part of the story and play a large part in forming your opinion.

A more blatant and clumsy example is the famous video of George Bush standing on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier after invaing Iraq: in the background on the superstructure of the ship was a giant banner that read "Mission Accomplished". Later, if you viewed that video on official White House website, the video was letterboxed such that the banner was cropped out.

This isn't new, either. The communists were very good at this, recall the famous removal of Trostky from a photo of Stalin giving a speech.

If you remember the Arnold Schwarzenegar movie Running Man, you can recall the scene in which the main character is framed for murder by editing the cockpit video to make it appear as if he had opened fire on protesters, when he had in fact done the opposite. At the time that movie was released, we all had a laugh at the science fiction of that scene, but the technology to do that has advanced rapidly.

 

[spaceranger]

Now this thread scares me. Keep it up!

 

[eveningsky339]

The number of girls with eating disorders is steadily increasing. Society puts a lot of pressure on them through these manipulated magazines to be skinny and perfect, and sometimes this is too much to bear.

For an anorexic, the skinnier they are, the more perfect they are. This is more or less the message popular culture is conveying. And there are certainly more individuals with eating disorders now than there were, say, in the early 1900s.

 

[willy88]

The number of girls with eating disorders is steadily increasing. Society puts a lot of pressure on them through these manipulated magazines to be skinny and perfect, and sometimes this is too much to bear.

For an anorexic, the skinnier they are, the more perfect they are. This is more or less the message popular culture is conveying. And there are certainly more individuals with eating disorders now than there were, say, in the early 1900s.

Indeed. It seems that they think that the more they resemble a Holocaust victim, the more beautiful they are. I guess this adolescent starvation fad kicked off sometime around the whole US "obesity epidemic" hype. It's really disgusting. :dry:

 

[Andy44]

The number of girls with eating disorders is steadily increasing.

Says who? Where did you SEE this? On TV? How many girls with eating disorders do you personally know? The fact that this issue is even on your radar screen makes my point for me: you have been manipulated into thinking this is a serious problem.

Note that I'm not saying these statistics are false, just that the only reason you care is that you have been programmed to place high regard on what you see on CNN or Fox or wherever you get your information. Some people in the news business decided they wanted this to become an issue, so they throw images in front of your eyes until you start to worry about it.

The same way people suddenly care about a 5-year-old little girl who gets kidnapped, while ignoring all other kidnapped children, simply because one particular photogenic girl has been chosen to be shown on the news over and over again, so that you can't avoid talking about it among your friends. This girl is special, this is an awful crime, those other abductions are not even thought of.

 

[jedidia]

How many girls with eating disorders do you personally know?

I personally don't, my Wife knows several (I don't do counseling with women, left alone teenage girls).

Anyways, it's NOT just due to distorted pictures. They do their share, But normally you can say that if the family is in order, even the pressure aplied by commercials won't get a girl into serious eating disorders. Eating disorders mostly show up when a girl gets the impression of being ugly by her parents, or otherwise not getting the recognition she needs by her family, be that due to divorce, alcoholism etc.
Eating disorders mostly need several factors. The current beauty-ideal is merely a finger that points the direction, it seldom is the actual cause that sends them of.

However, They do make women, evenvery beautiful women, doubt a lot in their actual beauty. You simply can't look like the girl on the cover of MAX without standing in front of the mirror for an hour or two and renew that process 2 to 3 times a day. Leading to the phenomena that the self-counciousnes of many of our modern women is majorly based on how long they spent before the mirror, their public image becomes a fassade and they get afraid to let people too near, because in a marriage you simply cannot keep it up. So, what our commercials produce are majorly women that are nice to look at but bad to life with. Which leads to unstability in families, which leads to teenage girls having eating disorders... Note, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, very simplified and not the only causes that play into it, so don't take it too seriously.

None the less, it would be nice if visuals would strife more towards depicting reality, otherwise we will create a utopia on pictures that looks so real that we might actualy believe we can make it happen. And then we fail trying, because reality is not just "what you see".

 

[n0mad23]

It's a bit like the scene in The Wizard of Oz, isn't it? "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Look at the success of cinema and television and you can see just how powerful this issue really is. Of course the trap here is just what I've invoked from film. It's easy to be directed by imagery, especially if some helpful expert is telling you what it means.

The issue of eating disorders here is a good example of this. How many commercials have you seen in the last week promoting weight loss products? How many of you have eaten at a fast food franchise in this same time period? Do you even notice the commercials generated by your favorite fast food joint anymore?

There are other issues underlying the eating disorders, and I've seen a couple of nods about this in previous posts in this thread. Willy88's pointing out the obesity epidemic vs. concentration camp imagery is quite astute, and we can tease it out a bit further as well.

I recently watched the Talking Heads' True Stories, circa `86 and shot on location in Texas. The thing that astounded me was how few overweight people were in those mall scenes. The aha I had was that this 'epidemic' is actually something that I've witnessed growing over the years. But I'm pretty sure this is the result of hard-wired evolutionary cravings that we haven't got over yet. In nature, the rarities for our ancestors were both fats and sweets, and so we're wired to crave both. McDonald's success is due to our biological heritage.

Conversely, we're culturally indebted to Descartes (via Plato and St. Augustine) and motivated by the artificial dichotomy of the mind/body split. A mind/body split coupled with an unhealthy hatred of the body and its functions. Unfortunately, in my role as an editor I've had to read one too many anorexia stories and have been really surprised at the role of this binary in these women. Most believe their bodies are traps, and want liberation by becoming pure consciousness. If you starve the body enough, this is possible. OK....

But there's other weirdness floating under the surface here as well. Willy88's concentration camp imagery is particularly provocative in the implications. If this is the image of beauty, what does it say about male sexual desire? We want our women to weak to struggle or mutually participate?

Stranger still, look at the "flat belly" female and compare it with the prepubescent belly of a boy. Can you see any difference? To me this is really strange, given the overwhelming reality of homophobia still around.

Yes indeed, "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."

However, I'm feeling a bit encouraged by the success of both the Daily Show and The Colbert Report as I see surrealism once again entering the fray of this absurd and overly mediated reality. Fighting fire with fire is still viable.