Quote:


Fake Photos Found to Alter Real Memories

Tuesday , November 27, 2007
By Andrea Thompson


In 2003, Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski caused an uproar when it was discovered that his picture of a British soldier yelling at fleeing residents in Iraq, published prominently by many U.S. newspapers, had been altered.

Walski had combined two snapshots taken moments apart of the British soldier urging residents to take cover as Iraqi forces opened fire.

This digital alteration is one of several in recent years to cast doubt on the old saying that the camera doesn't lie.

Some researchers are worried that digitally altered photos could alter our perceptions and memories of public events.

To test what effect doctored photos might have, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Padua in Italy showed 299 people aged 19 to 84 either an actual photo or an altered photo of two historical events, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing and the 2003 anti-war protest in Rome.

The original Tiananmen Square image was altered to show a crowd watching at the sidelines as a lone man stands in front of a row of tanks.

The Rome anti-war protest photograph was altered to show riot police and a menacing, masked protester among the crowd of demonstrators.

When answering questions about the events, the participants had differing recollections of what happened.

Those who viewed the altered images of the Rome protest recalled the demonstration as violent and negative and recollected more physical confrontation and property damage than actually occurred.

Participants who viewed the doctored photos also said they were less inclined to take part in future protests, according to the study, detailed in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

"It's potentially a form of human engineering that could be applied to us against our knowledge and against our wishes, and we ought to be vigilant about it," said UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who designed the study. "With the addition of a few little upsetting and arousing elements in the Rome protest photo, people remembered this peaceful protest as being more violent than it was, and as a society we have to figure how we can regulate this."

Copyright © 2007 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

so what do you think? could the masses of a particular country be driven to believe one tyrant's ideals just through photo re-engineering? could any government and/or terrorist be using this today?

I thought this was really interesting, and I wanted to hear other people's thoughts.




Edited 1 time(s). Last edited Wednesday, November 28, 2007 5:30 AM

Desert Tuners

“When you come across a big kettle of crazy, it’s best not to stir it.”

Something tells me it already has.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

could photo engineering be the ONLY form of propaganda? no, but it most certainly IS.

i mean this really makes sense if you think about it. i mean if you simply retell a story differently, and repeat it, then people start to question (and eventually change) their own perceptions to match the status quo. now THAT has been going on for hundreds of years...photos and videos are only the next step.

very interesting concept though....

(tabs) wrote:could photo engineering be the ONLY form of propaganda? no, but it most certainly IS.

i mean this really makes sense if you think about it. i mean if you simply retell a story differently, and repeat it, then people start to question (and eventually change) their own perceptions to match the status quo. now THAT has been going on for hundreds of years...photos and videos are only the next step.

very interesting concept though....

I don't think it's a status quo thing. I think this is showing that our mind's recollection of memories is faulted.


Desert Tuners

“When you come across a big kettle of crazy, it’s best not to stir it.”

i was saying that it was more of a "wow, thats not how i remember it, but i'll agree with them anyway because i guess i was wrong". only on a subconscious level so that the person isnt aware that they are doing it. after all, a picture has always been solid proof of something (until recently of course) so people have it ingrained in their minds that what they see must be real and if what they remember isnt what they are seeing in a picture, then they will realign their thinking to compensate for the difference.

Well, I don't think that's completely accurate. It's weird you mention this because I was reading about this very subject the other day.

I think that, yes memories can be altered by both time and false images. But, only under a specific set of circumstances. Childhood memories are particularly malleable. That's why so many people "remember" Satanic Ritual Abuse or Alien Abduction, for example, when it obviously couldn't have happened. The reason for this is that it happened 15-30 years ago and was recorded by a brain that was growing and didn't have the concept of time or reality that we do as adults. It's easy to modify childhood memories, especially traumatic ones.

Another set of memories that can be altered are memories we don't have an investment in or those we didn't bother remembering correctly in the first place. Lemme give you an example: A guy says that he was mugged on your street and that while you were parking your car you glanced over and looked at the mugger as he was jogging away. Did it happen? Could have. You wouldn't have noticed a JOGGER right? Just another guy doing exercise. So if he showed you a picture of a jogger next to your car you might "remember" him even if he'd never been there in the first place. You don't care enough one way or the other.

But when you DO care about something, you tend to hold onto the memory no matter what, mostly because you can't forget it. If you doctored all the 9/11 footage to show aliens attacking the World Trade Center people wouldn't believe it no matter how convincing you'd made it, mostly because they can't forget that event. It's traumatized into their subconscious.

Oh, and one more thing. That article talked about riot police and Tianement Square and about doctored images. Well, it's there's also the "I was at the World Series" effect to deal with. How many people say they were somewhere they obviously weren't? People want to remember being there alongside the lone man in China, people want the protesters at a riot to be evil (or the cops to be evil, depending on which side they're taking). This isn't due to memory anymore, this is about remembering events in a way we'd prefer for them to have happened to go along with our own personal beliefs. The key thing is though that deep down we KNOW we're full of crap, just like Uncle Don knows that he never went to the World Series. It's like the old saying says, you're only sold what you want to buy. No one can "brainwash" anyone, they can only convince you of things you already wanted to believe.

Anyway, yeah I believe that people can be convinced by doctored pictures, but only about things that they didn't see or don't really care about, or have they've already made up their mind about long before they saw a picture.

Knoxfire wrote:Anyway, yeah I believe that people can be convinced by doctored pictures, but only about things that they didn't see or don't really care about, or have they've already made up their mind about long before they saw a picture.

but it might be that one person that, let's say, sways a jury to convict an innocent person. he might have just walked by a crime scene or something like that. or a decidedly left-wing publication uses doctored images to sway a group of people to vote for their candidate. these aren't exactly subliminal messages, and with more and more media outlets using digital imaging, just imagine what the worst case scenario might be.

my g/f is a journalism major and is going through a class right now where they're talking about ethics in journalism. the guy that doctored the image of the British soldier mentioned above is one of the most talked about subjects. she tells me that he will never work in journalism again after basically being ostracized.

so, how would we go about ensuring that this "power isn't used for evil"?


Desert Tuners

“When you come across a big kettle of crazy, it’s best not to stir it.”

Ethics in Journalism is one of the biggest contradictions in terms I have ever heard.

Sorry to be a prick about it...

Anyhow, we can't make sure the power isn't used for evil--IMHO evil has already used it. We just become aware of it and try to make sure it doesn't happen to us. Granted, it will take awhile. Think of how long it took to make us aware that stage magic isn't witchcraft.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

[quote=Keeper Of The Light™ (Strazca)] Think of how long it took to make us aware that stage magic isn't witchcraft.
It isn't?

Nope Stage magic can enable a man to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Witchcraft can sause a witch to turn someone into a newt...where they will invariably get better.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

Photo-chopping was used to great success in Germany (German soldiers being welcomed in Poland), Russia (e.g. Lenin having Trotsky removed from all public photo archives), China (Mao Tse Tung leading the long march in pristine fatigues), Japan US airmen surrendering after the doolittle raid), USA (Time Magazine printing a BLATANT photochop of Lee Harvey Oswald the week after Kennedy was assassinated), UK (Churchill's portrait)...

This is nothing new, just the tools are fancier.



Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

I understand that GAM, but the tools haven't only gotten fancier, but are easier and cheaper to obtain.


Desert Tuners

“When you come across a big kettle of crazy, it’s best not to stir it.”

Stalin's time, all you needed was a scalpel, a sheet of photo paper, and a metal garbage bin to burn the original.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

millions of people in this world are so suceptible to influence, they can be swayed by the alteration of a single word in a document... so if a picture says a thousand words, altering it can easily have the same effect.

this guy isn't the first person to doctor a photograph, he's just one of the few who's been caught. probably happens more than most people think. not just in the news either, but in magazines and all over the internet.

People are so easily influenced by the media, its scary that the world goes off of things they see from others and not themselves. The media is constantly showing all the bad and never the good. This is a problem, and it really needs to be stopped.