Jonathan Glater picks up the story of the Martha Stewart Newsweek cover for the New York Times today. More coverage here. The long and the short of it -- the picture on the right isn't Martha (which makes sense, right -- because since she's in prison?), but instead is an old shot of Martha's head grafted onto another person's body. Newsweek says this was made obvious by the credit on page 3. (Query: If you don't open the magazine and just see it on the newsstand, is it still obvious?)
For the legally inclined, a nice student Note by Rebecca Brown can be found here which chronicles the partly legal, but mostly ethical, hijinx of digital image manipulation. For instance, the replacement of real advertisements in Times Square with virtual ones in the first Spiderman movie actually led to a lawsuit by the real ad owners alleging -- of all things -- trespass to chattels. And the paper also discusses an Ur-Rathergate scandal, also involving Times Square. In 1999, CBS replaced the NBC logo in Times Square with its own during Rather's live broadcasts, leading Rather to apologize, saying: "There is no excuse for it. I did not grasp the ethical implications of this and that was wrong on my part."
Where's the harm with digitally manipulated photographs that people presume are real? Perhaps this is an open question, post-Baudrillard, but there's clearly some cause for concern when we mingle fantasy with reality. Putting aside those faked moon landings, there have been serious debates in journalism circles about finding some ground rules for augmenting and manipulating photography. In an AJR article on the subject, Joe Elbert, a photo editor at the Washington post, is quoted as saying: "you never change reality." But the temptation to alter reality is great, especially when there is some marginal money to be made.
And where reality happens to be virtual in the first place, there's nothing to lose, right?
Well I maintain that online identity is still identity and its becoming a stronger form in all kinds of social, civil and commercial ways, thus I think that the ethical considerations of some online acts is shifting – or at least should do.
In this case I would not be at all happy if I found an image of my SL avatar in the sort of SL club that I would not go to. And while it just so happens that my SL avi looks pretty much like me (the cartoon version of me so the designers told me) this is not the crux of the issue. Just so long as any given image is strongly associated with me in a given community then I care what happens to it. Now what kind of legal protections should be afforded are a different matter as is well known I’m highly dubious about the commoditisation of identity, as I deny that commoditisation is the only way to protect rights.
Posted by: ren | Mar 03, 2005 at 09:01
Jeff Cole
The harm occurs when a trespasser nicks a bit o' the rival, but non-exclusive, Promotion commons.Posted by: Jeff Cole | Mar 03, 2005 at 10:25
As if we believed in every photograph we saw before this popped up. We have today the technology to manipulate and create images in a very efficient and many times _realistic_ fashion. I think it's up Newsweek to decide how they want their readers to perceive their content (including images). Considered the physical and graphical manipulation we can do to the human body, an avatar might be a just as real representation of a person as if looking at a picture or a physical meeting. Not the same but as true.
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