B.o.B. Slack
Today a friend posted an article on B.o.B.'s Flat Earth Twitter rant. I normally wouldn't have read it, all usual considerations accounting, but the preview image to the article caught my eye. B.o.B. sez Felix Baumgartner's spacejump isn't proof of a round earth because GoPro cameras are wide angle and thus distort edges into curves.
Honestly, that's a pretty clever argument. In order to measure scales and distances of an object in a photograph, you have to know the lens length and how far from the subject the photographer is, how it distorts spacial relationships, and how large the film stock or sensor is. In order to trust a photograph you have to know where the photographer took it and the photographer's literal and metaphorical distance from that subject. Without saying it in a particularly cerebral or academic way, B.o.B. is saying that in order to trust a photograph you have to trust the person who took it.
So reader, I clicked the link. I read through the article describing his arguments. And then I clicked through to his Twitter and read the arguments.
I won't get into specifics but it basically boils down to this. Stop me if you've heard this before:
* The government and the corporations are in cahoots to hide knowledge and resources from you so that they can retain power and prevent you and everyone you know from getting equitable distribution.
* All of the big name authorities who support them are in bed with them, all the major celebrities that are into it are either dumb or acting.
* Here are the images passed off as 'reality' which a healthy dosage of skepticism can show suffer failings of objectivity,
* and here are a bunch of images and data that support my argument and what I believe. Many of them have been conveniently put together in macro- and info-graphic form.
Basically B.o.B.'s arguing the same thing every single one of your friends -- and, well, YOU -- are arguing on your Facebook walls. The difference is he's just committed to a much less popular conspiracy theory.
And that's the fuck of the epistemology of mass communication. A photograph is merely a framing out of all other information but what the photographer intends to show. In the end the photograph you trust is the photograph that reflects what you see. It's enough to give you, as David Foster Wallace termed, 'the howling fantods.'
Most of the time. Occasionally a photograph off enough, altered enough, will upset your sense of reality, possibly by falling into the Uncanny Valley, that even if you want to believe it you just know something isn't right. That moment may not in and of itself change your mind, but it could. It will at least make you wary that some photographers supporting your beliefs are something short of sincere. Which realization you can use to justify your beliefs because you feel smart enough to capture the trap even when the trap is compelling; or you might find yourself using the realization to start becoming skeptical of your own beliefs and then, over time, slowly see the world of images for what they really are: media.
Doesn't really save you from believing the majority of what you see and read. Even if you feel you're the person who disbelieves most things, for the most part you trust other people's statements to either be true, or a representation of what they find to be true, or even if they are lying, the lie itself a representation of their inability to cognitively handle what is true. You believe in a 'reality' somewhere in there regardless, is what I'm saying. And you're not wrong there.
The resolution of the paradox of epistemology in mass communication is what I've already mentioned before: trust. The reality exists there somewhere and humanity as a whole, each brain a node rather than a unit, trends in the long term toward thinking less wrong. In the end we all trust different people or groups or sources or logics or beliefs or rules, but the average has tended toward a net positive in human comfort and knowledge.
So we have that going for us, which is nice.
--PolarisDiB
Honestly, that's a pretty clever argument. In order to measure scales and distances of an object in a photograph, you have to know the lens length and how far from the subject the photographer is, how it distorts spacial relationships, and how large the film stock or sensor is. In order to trust a photograph you have to know where the photographer took it and the photographer's literal and metaphorical distance from that subject. Without saying it in a particularly cerebral or academic way, B.o.B. is saying that in order to trust a photograph you have to trust the person who took it.
So reader, I clicked the link. I read through the article describing his arguments. And then I clicked through to his Twitter and read the arguments.
I won't get into specifics but it basically boils down to this. Stop me if you've heard this before:
* The government and the corporations are in cahoots to hide knowledge and resources from you so that they can retain power and prevent you and everyone you know from getting equitable distribution.
* All of the big name authorities who support them are in bed with them, all the major celebrities that are into it are either dumb or acting.
* Here are the images passed off as 'reality' which a healthy dosage of skepticism can show suffer failings of objectivity,
* and here are a bunch of images and data that support my argument and what I believe. Many of them have been conveniently put together in macro- and info-graphic form.
Basically B.o.B.'s arguing the same thing every single one of your friends -- and, well, YOU -- are arguing on your Facebook walls. The difference is he's just committed to a much less popular conspiracy theory.
And that's the fuck of the epistemology of mass communication. A photograph is merely a framing out of all other information but what the photographer intends to show. In the end the photograph you trust is the photograph that reflects what you see. It's enough to give you, as David Foster Wallace termed, 'the howling fantods.'
Most of the time. Occasionally a photograph off enough, altered enough, will upset your sense of reality, possibly by falling into the Uncanny Valley, that even if you want to believe it you just know something isn't right. That moment may not in and of itself change your mind, but it could. It will at least make you wary that some photographers supporting your beliefs are something short of sincere. Which realization you can use to justify your beliefs because you feel smart enough to capture the trap even when the trap is compelling; or you might find yourself using the realization to start becoming skeptical of your own beliefs and then, over time, slowly see the world of images for what they really are: media.
Doesn't really save you from believing the majority of what you see and read. Even if you feel you're the person who disbelieves most things, for the most part you trust other people's statements to either be true, or a representation of what they find to be true, or even if they are lying, the lie itself a representation of their inability to cognitively handle what is true. You believe in a 'reality' somewhere in there regardless, is what I'm saying. And you're not wrong there.
The resolution of the paradox of epistemology in mass communication is what I've already mentioned before: trust. The reality exists there somewhere and humanity as a whole, each brain a node rather than a unit, trends in the long term toward thinking less wrong. In the end we all trust different people or groups or sources or logics or beliefs or rules, but the average has tended toward a net positive in human comfort and knowledge.
So we have that going for us, which is nice.
--PolarisDiB