Pee break deconstructed
Wired has a neat article about the ramification of George Bush’s pee-break note to Condi Rice.
What I found most interesting was this passage:
But if Kranz is right, the thing that establishes the veracity of an image is not the image itself, or even the words that put it in context, but our relationship of trust with the person speaking those words… if you’re really intent on falsifying, the last thing you’d do is leave evidence of your alterations… The more I think about my own photography habits, the more I’m convinced that the idea of an “unmanipulated” or “unedited” photo is an absurdity. I’m manipulating and editing the whole time! I see the picture in my head, choose the focal length of the lens, zoom, frame the composition in my camera viewfinder, sense a “decisive moment,” press the shutter, then later open the downloaded images in Photoshop, select the best ones, rotate them, change the cropping, bring up the contrast, make the colors look more natural, clean them up.
I like the non-discrete definition of truth as a relationship between the producer and consumer of the media rather than measured against some absolute. Every play a game against someone (like Killer Instinct or Quake) and been accused of being “cheesy”? The complainer is, in fact, expressing two things: “I hate it that you are beating me,” and “I believe in an absolute standard of quality game playing that you are failing against.” The first statement is easy to answer: “Don’t be a wuss.” The second is harder: haven’t we all, in each of our fields (coding, playing games, writing music, etc.) felt that there is some Yardstick Of Truth out there measuring us? That if we could only stretch forth our efforts our measurements against this Yardstick would show progress towards some finite and reachable goal?
Bullshit. As that last passage from the Wired article indicates, there’s no fidelity to be gained by assaying the Absolute Truth of things whether its photography or fighting games or coding or whatever. That’s a much more interesting world to me.