The truth in visual representations

Yichen Wei

yw130215@ohio.edu

   

Photo manipulation is the most commonly used way to control the public’s mind and let them believe the visual images they see. As the technology developed today more and more media coverage chooses to retouch first hand photos to express the designated information.  They are familiar with the techniques of the photo editing and retouching and know how to make the trace invisible to the public. Softwares like photoshop and Pixlr could easily reach out the result of altering the digital photo media into a completely new version with a new background setting. Numerous photo editing tutorials are really easily to be searched and learned online so that most people could reach out to them and apply them into the news making process. 

 

 Video source: YouTube

 

Visual communication has become a way of spreading misinformation and propaganda for a long period of time. If they aim to highlight the salient part of the issue they would utilize this visual approach to create a stronger impact on the public when they read it. So that the situation would be the media outlets presenting misleading or edited real images into fake news deliberately. 

 

Picture source: Pinterest

But still people’s ability to detect photo manipulation is relatively weak, because the prevalence of social media contents and lots of networking websites are invading every part of people’s life nowadays. 

 

How to figure out the misinformation through the effect of photo manipulation? 

 

The investigation of the background of the information that is perceived is the significant step. Keep the curiosity and the sense of exploration and then suspect everything that you’ve read. Always think independently and never easily trust the news coverage is the approach to get close to the truth. And the sources of the news platforms could stem from various origins like the mouth of people, the front line journalist and also the science journals and the mix of them. Double comparing with the different news platforms and digging out where the news is from and some data collection based journal would be a better and accurate source of the information. Also some topics that are related to politics and refugees which are sensitive have more tendency to become misinformation and photo manipulation to control over the trend.The consciousness of the sense for the correct information need to be positively cultivated by the people themselves and this is a inevitable process to the public in this society.