Name: Evaluating Photos & Videos: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #7
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T02:51:56.000Z
Duration: 13 min 19 s
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Hi I'm John Green, and this is Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information.

So, images are incredibly powerful to human brains.

Like, I read and loved the first four Harry Potter books before seeing a Harry Potter

And I really liked the movie, but after watching it, I could never see my Harry Potter or Hermione

ever again--I saw only Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson.

And also I learned that Hermione is pronounced Hermione.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words -- and by “they” I mean the advertiser

who supposedly coined that idiom in the 1940s.

Photographs in particular feel real and objective to us, because they seem to capture a moment

More than 150 years ago, Matthew Brady's iconic Civil War photographs were often staged,

for instance, his assistants would move corpses and change their postures to maximize the

But while images have never been as reliable as they seem, this is especially true in the

In fact, consider the image you're looking at right now.

If you spend as much time online as I do, you spend a lot of it looking at images.

Sometimes those images are unedited, although even then choices are made--how to frame the

image, what to photograph, when and how to share it.

Other times, the images are obviously altered with bunny ear filters or meme text.

Sometimes images are altered in ways meant to fool us.

So how can we decipher what's real and what's not?

Meredith says that meme is so old that nobody is going to get the joke.

So far during this series we've talked about how important it is to find out who's behind

information we learn online, why they're posting it, and whether the evidence is reliable.

And thanks to their power, images are a very common form of online evidence.

But just like data or text, image-based evidence can be relevant and reliable or irrelevant

In order to make sense of our online surroundings it is critical to think carefully about whether

image-based evidence is trustworthy because we're used to thinking that “seeing is

I means, special effects-laden movies are popular in part because they are so visually

thrilling--even though we know they aren't real, they look real, or at least adjacent

That is why, for instance, I found all five transformers films completely watchable despite

their lack of … you know, plot, character and comprehensible worldbuilding and etc.

They also have that Shia LeBouef in them.

So, in movies, filmmakers depend partly on our ability to get lost in images--when we

watch a conversation between two people in a film, for instance, we rarely consider that

forty-five minutes elapsed between this shot and this one, because the camera and lights

The willingness of the human brain to assume that images are real is consistently manipulated

Consider, for instance, this manipulated picture of mass shooting survivor and activist Emma

It's doctored to make her look like she was tearing up the U.S. Constitution instead

of the real picture she took with a gun-range target.

Or this one of President Trump supporters whose shirts were digitally altered to read

“Make America White Again” instead of their actual “Make America Great Again”

But images don't have to be altered to fools us, though.

Sometimes bad actors use real, untouched photos but falsify their context.

And that can have really serious consequences.

For instance, this image of an election in Mexico in 2017 circulated online as a meme

claiming undocumented immigrants were voting in the nonexistent town of Battsville, Arizona.

Or this image of children sleeping in what looks like a cage at a detention facility

It was circulated widely in 2018 as controversy grew over policies for separating undocumented

migrant children and parents at the U.S. border.

Although the conditions were similar for many of the children being held in 2018, when the

photo went viral it was unaccompanied by its original context: the date.

And then once this mistake was revealed, it was used by many to dismiss the entire controversy

A study by the Stanford History Education Group has shown just how easy it can be for

people to let images and their context go unchallenged.

So, as you know from previous episodes, the Stanford History Education Group is affiliated

They developed MediaWise, which is what this series is based on.

Anyway, during the Stanford History Education Group study, they showed 170 high school students

a photo from Imgur of these weird looking flowers.

The photo's caption claimed that the flowers had “nuclear birth defects.”

Fukushima was in the photo title, implying they were from the Fukushima nuclear disaster

Despite no evidence that the photo actually showed these effects, or that radiation caused

the mutations, over 80 percent of the students did not question the source of the photo.

There wasn't even any evidence to show the photo was taken in Japan!

In reality, these daisies are most likely the victims of a genetic mutation called “fascination”

that isn't related to nuclear radiation in any way.

Bottom line: nature is really wild all by herself.

I mean, do I need to bring back the picture of the star-nosed mole?

Because it's so easy to turn images into manipulation machines, when you encounter

a suspicious image online, it's crucial to investigate who is behind it and whether

We also must look for context, to be sure an image supports the claim being made.

Does the story, blog, or social media post where you encountered the image provide a

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Evaluating Photos & Videos: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #7

context

critical

evidence

determine