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0 pointsLordDragonfang5y ago0 comments

>Also very common to have multiple people conclude very different things from a photo.

But that's true for text, too. The US just had a very major politicized event where two sides had two wildly different conclusions over what one man's words meant. And there's a grand legal tradition of taking one specific document and interpreting what its words mean and applying it to a plethora of situations. There's plenty of people that come to wildly different conclusions over what certain amendments do or do not mean.

Hell, look at literary analysis! You can give people a book like 1984, and some people will say in all confidence that it is explicitly anti-socialism, when the author said the literal opposite. And that's something with a supposedly clear ideological message, to say nothing of works with less concrete themes.

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sellyme5y ago

All three of your examples concern people with a vested interest in arriving at a certain conclusion established long before they ever actually look at the text in question. No communication medium will solve the problem of humans trying to bend that communication to fit their pre-existing opinions.

For neutral observers, I would definitely argue that text is far more concrete than photos. There's a whole host of reasons for this in my opinion, but one that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is that humans are used to seeing images in three dimensions, whereas photos are typically two-dimensional. By removing an entire axis of data you're introducing far more room for ambiguity than could have existed previously.

BeetleB5y ago

The ideological message in 1984 is anything but clear when you compare it to what the message would look like had George Orwell merely written a nonfiction treatise, without resorting to any literary devices.

If you know nothing of Orwell or the historical importance of 1984 and you read the book, it certainly wouldn't be clear that Orwell was trying to make a point, let alone what that point is. Some people would guess it does, others would say "It's just a story." Orwell intentionally obfuscated his point in choosing the mode of delivery (fiction). Indeed, this intentional obfuscation/ambiguity by fiction writers is what keeps literature professors employed.

The difference is that you can read a work like 1984 and at least know it is fiction, and that the message, if any, is hidden. Whereas you cannot look at a photo and easily tell if it's documenting what you think it is, no matter how much the photographer tries. At best you can see the shapes, and to a much lesser extent, things like colors/contrast. What the photographer was trying to convey is much more open to interpretation than 1984 is.

gowld5y ago

I disagree on obfuscation, and I think Orwell would too.

Orwell probably knew that if he wrote a dry academic tome, no one would read it, and that would obscure the message by default.

LordDragonfangOP5y ago

Sorry, when I said "clear ideological point" I meant "clear that some ideological point was being made", not that it was clear what the message was. I thought I made that clear by immediately pointing out that people disagree on what the point of the story is.

The fact that I'm even having to make this clarification is kind of the point of my argument. And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear.

Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.

BeetleB5y ago

> And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear.

No, it's evidence that George Orwell was obfuscating his point. When you make a point through fiction, that is obfuscation. To make my point clear, had you made a faithful version of 1984 into a movie, people who know nothing of the book would still not be clear about whether it has a point or not. It has nothing to do with it being in text form.

> Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.

The two are not contradictory. It's easy to tell what is being documented. Whether it is true is a different story.

The crux of my discussion isn't about what happens when the author/photographer is intentionally trying to mislead, but when they are not trying to mislead. If an author writes a nonfiction treatise it leaves a lot less room for ambiguity. When I read PG's essays, I don't have discussions with others on what he really means. A photo, without context, can inspire several emotions, all unrelated to reality, and this is true no matter how hard the photographer tries. Case in point, when I was in school, my teacher showed the class a photo he had taken from a newspaper - but without any context. He asked the students to try to write a news article where the photo would make sense. Obviously, the responses were widely different, and none was close to the reality. In some stories, the subjects in the photos were victims. In others, they were the villians. The reality turned out to be their being heroes.

Even when you provide accurate context to a photo, there are no shortage of instances where once you see the video of the event and/or hear from the subject, you find out that while the context was correct, the photo is showing a mere moment that is not reflecting what most people who see the photo are thinking. Take a video of someone having a long conversation, where they laugh often. It's not hard to capture a frame where it looks like the person is in pain.

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sellyme5y ago

BeetleB5y ago

gowld5y ago

I disagree on obfuscation, and I think Orwell would too.

Orwell probably knew that if he wrote a dry academic tome, no one would read it, and that would obscure the message by default.

LordDragonfangOP5y ago

Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.

BeetleB5y ago

> And that you can even argue that it wouldn't be clear that 1984 is trying to make a point is evidence that text is not inherently clear.

> Also, I don't know how you can claim that it's easier to tell what text is documenting than a picture. It's much easier to lie with text.

The two are not contradictory. It's easy to tell what is being documented. Whether it is true is a different story.

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