Photoshop Alters Memories

[arigram]

Nice clip John.

Ok, I have more to say on the subject. My head is a bit off but I'll try to stay inline.
I will possibly forget something so I'll add it tomorrow.
Consider these things:

1) Photo/Video Journalism dies. And all visual evidence of an event. Doctoring journalistic photos isn't news, but what is, the general acceptance of what is ok, is changing. Now, one might twist the truth a bit, not aiming for propaganda necessarily but for "aesthetic" reasons, like in the Beirut bombing, Iranian missiles and the photo Haris touched on. Then, slowly, manipulated aesthetics become acceptable by the public, ("Who cares how many planes flew over?" or "So he made the picture more dramatic, but didn't change the event") and then news editors stop firing the Photoshoppers and just going with it. Tabloid aesthetics become the norm. Photos are nothing more than entertaining illustrations. No visual evidence of a crime can be trust anymore.
In my photographic collection about the Battle of Crete in WWII, there are also hand drawn illustrations in known magazines of scenes that their journalists weren't able to cover. One though, would know that these BW sketches were not far from pure fiction. But with a photograph...
2) People start dis/appearing from family albums. Who are you? Your picture isn't here! The daughter gets a pony she never had really. Mom was so perfect looking in her early years and now looks like a hag. The vacations that never were. Yes, Nick did attend his father's funeral, he's on the photo, see? Once I used to be a fireman. Or was I? Did Mary really like me like she shows in this picture or not? Were these people my friends really? Did I do that? Was I like this?
3) Plastic surgery. A product of the star system. Of photography and cinema. You do plastic surgery on the photograph, you do a plastic surgery to keep that appearance in real life. Clearly a sign of the vain, the ones afraid of old age and death, of failure, of not being acceptable. A sign of the rich and eccentric. Yet, has been more and more common. Fix that nose, that ass, those boobs, that scar, those wrinkles. When most common snapshots become manipulated, isn't real manipulation going to be even more common.
4) History dies. A picture is worth a thousand words. You can dress and twist and spin a text as much as you like, but a photograph, a video was taken for real and wasn't touched, only in rare occasions. Connected with point 1) but even more so, as our history includes far more senses now. Its not just the text that is propaganda now. But all the rest as well. And its ok, because everyone's used to it.
5) Your photographs are the memories of those events. Moved from your head to an external storage device. The moment you have photographed remains with you the way its on print/screen. You're in the photograph when you take it and thus you live the moment through that photograph. Even if it wasn't taken by you, that visual evidence in front of you colors and shapes your real memory. So, in the end, those photographed moments are what they appear to be not what your head tells you, if it was even stored there.
6) A snapshot isn't a capture of a moment in time, of a real past event, of a memory, of a person. It is a virtual reality fantasy world avatar, like in World of Warcraft. A fake person, a fake event, the way you would have liked it to be just to tickle your fantasy and desires. It becomes entertainment. No more real than that big green Orc with the medieval armor and sword on the computer screen. Like in Second Life, a second you. The You, you want, not who you really are or was.
7) Communication becomes fiction completely.