At the risk of creating a needless echo of a conversation already sounding forth, I need to point out something I just learned about image manipulation and blogging when I tried to post this message as a comment in a conversation taking place at the if:book blog. The discussion there centers around Image Culture, a piece written by Christine Rosen in which Rosen worries about the dangers of "moving from an era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image." Rosen's article mostly plows already-furrowed ground--images can be easily manipulated, print is under threat and its demise might spell bad things for intellect and culture. No doubt these are concerns worth weighing, but my reading boils the fears down to little more than familiar nostalgia and/or subservience to the written word.

Now I'm realizing the extent to which our communication is still shaped in large part by alphabetic text. I took a couple of images from one of the Fark photoshop contests discussed by Rosen, resized and stacked them for easy display, took a screen shot of the layers in photoshop, and then tried to integrate them into the comment I wanted to add to the conversation. Once previewed or posted, however, the blog software stripped out any reference to the images I had written into the posting. I see why one might not want any random commenter splashing images over a blog, but given the topic of discussion it seems incredibly telling that the written text made it through the filter while the fark-based images did not. Perhaps Rosen has less to fear than I had first supposed. Below is my original posting with the images included.

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Just thought I'd add this observation I had when I first read this post last week. It is telling, I think, that on the same day a photoshop contest was taking place on Fark under the topic "If advertising were 100% honest." Over time, most of the images there will likely disappear, but ones like the hummer or the Wal-Mart manipulation clearly invoke satire that would stand with what Rosen sees as "the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey." Bah. I think Rosen has it backwards in thinking that we lose respect when we manipulate things. Instead, we manipulate the things we no longer respect.

But more to the point here is the fact that Farkers and other manipulators are exchanging ideas visually. The photoshop contests stand out because they are taking place in a discussion forum where we've grown so used to the give and take of alphabetic text. I guess at some level Rosen, and countless others, would acknowledge that the real fear is the new presence of image creation as a mode of communication, a communication in which creators filter, layer, crop, nudge, mask, clone, and perform any number of other sophisticated compositional moves. Couching the fear in terms of truth or respect--as most everyone here has pointed out--really just ignores the more radical transformation underlying the concern. The fear is the loss of the power of the word.