Category Archives: Reviews

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When ‘Tell Me’ Beats ‘Show Me’

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Internet giants seem to be racing to the bottom by turning their news sites into picture books with bright colors and sparse content.

Tech is turning out more drek. Why is almost every site trying to convert their news into clickbait pictures? We don’t need to see B-roll footage of the misery in Gaza for a story about what the next steps to secure peace might be. The real news lies in the thinking of figures in Gaza, the White House and Tel Aviv. We also need clear numbers rather than images to account for the ruinous health care costs facing many Americans.

For what it is worth, this insight came to me after a necessary upgrade to  Windows-11. After purchasing a new computer to be able to manage the decidedly underwhelming software, Microsoft thrust it’s MSM Webpage at me as an added bonus. It was enough to trigger my frustration.

Their page of ads and news “stories” caught my eye quite literally. The layout of the version I saw was a stash of videos dealing with everything from the weather to news about barely qualified people seeking White House jobs. The real meat of some of these stories could be more efficiently presented in straightforward reporting and more than 500 words of text.

One medium is never fully convertible into another medium.

We all love visual stories. But the hard truth is that a person’s world becomes highly circumscribed if their access to big and important ideas is hobbled with the need for interesting pictures. I noticed my frustration because my new computer came with glitches that needed to be fixed by adjustments to specific settings, none of which were well explained by a person on YouTube who assumed his job was to show me something. I was looking for lists and sequences, which had to be awkwardly communicated off camera by a tech who was trying to be helpful.

My mistake was turning to a visual medium. I finally got help from a print-oriented forum where the emphasis was on explanation and amplification, not interesting images.

As this site has noted before, many worthy ideas do not have an easy visual form. Policies, values, administrative decisions, directions on fixing a computer problem and similar kinds of topics need discursive amplification, not a talking head proceeding at the glacial pace of 200 words a minute.  Ditto for help in speeding up my slow computer. YouTube can be helpful in showing how to fix things; but not so much if there is a lot of telling to do as well. It has unfortunately become the default medium for explaining something, even when the explainer has no flair for visual communication. It is used because it is there.  If you find yourself frantically taking notes from a segment, you can understand the paradox of having to translate from a medium of images to a medium of ideas. As we know, at least intuitively, one medium is never fully convertible into another medium.

Recent news stories report another decline in the reading ability of the nation’s grade-schoolers occurring along with handwringing from professors at Harvard complaining that their students won’t read. If we wonder what the cost of turning our kids into smartphone addicts is, we may not need to look any further. The small screens of those phones and their equivalents are full of junk images and too little supporting text.

It does not have to be this way. A glance at The Week Junior, the popular weekly news magazine for kids, shows how non visual topics can be covered in effective ways. Even subjects like freedom of speech and the characteristics of good poetry can be explained in interesting and age-appropriate levels. The Week Junior is a model of how our children should spend more of their time.

Obviously, visual clickbait functions as a hook to pull a consumer in. But I worry that we are aiming at the low. Young “readers” may need primary colors and cartoon images at the gateway of literacy. But older readers should be self-starters. If we allow the acquisition of knowledge and new information to proceed at the pace of a poky PowerPoint show, we can only admire our predecessors who understood that advanced insights require the incisive comprehension of a master reader.

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Seeing Is . . . Well, Just Seeing

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Lately, I have seen too many cats smoking cigars and dogs playing poker.

Pardon me for saying the obvious. But it is no longer possible to trust photos we routinely see on many internet platforms. Perhaps I am the last to notice, but a combination of photo-shopping and animation has begun to make it a challenge to tell the difference between the real and the fake. Lately, I have seen too many cats smoking cigars, dogs playing poker, and a preschooler performing Shostakovich. A.I.-produced photos and videos have gotten that good. A few days ago I saw an image of the President playing golf, but looking mighty wide from the back. The photo suggested that seat belt extenders would definitely be a required item on Air Force One. That picture was probably photoshopped, much like what his own team does when he shows up in a meme that would be an eight-year-old’s idea of an action figure.

Fast Food Worker From the Feline Community
byu/ZashManson inaivideo

As in the above example, some images are too cute. But it must be getting harder for photo editors in various news organizations to verify less playful images that come their way. That’s one advantage to keep photojournalists on staff. By contrast, social media represents the equivalent of the wild west. Too many people are willing to ignore the courtesy of sincere veracity that would have been honored even a generation ago.

If we already live in a world where fantasies are mistaken as fact, what are we to do with the age-old axiom that “seeing is believing?” We all recognize the obvious giveaways in classic animation and set-ups like the above example of a feline fast food worker. It is quite another thing to conceal artificial creations about subjects that matter in photorealistic material. Apparently, our non-literate President has already been deceived by “news” videos of indeterminate origin passed on by others; Trump gorges on his preferred medium of images.

There are folks on YouTube who have tried to show how a fake can be recognized. I appreciate their efforts. But short of seeing a third arm on a person, I often miss the ostensible giveaway in a fabricated piece. And there appears to be no uniform or emerging norms for labeling a counterfeit picture or a video.

Of course the larger context here is that hand-wringing over hybrid kinds of media is not new. Critics and theorists have debated for some years about the authenticity of all sorts of arts that are easily reproduced. A classic is Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And there is the conductor and composer John Phillip Sousa, who claimed that the “canned music” of a recording debased the real thing. Add in the complexity that an estimated half of all social media content now is created by various forms of A.I. and we have a problem.

Many who have made a systematic study of the internet generally note that there has been a steady decline in authentic human-generated content. Again, this applies most directly to platforms like X, Facebook, and the like. A more recent transformation is video, where producers can add facsimiles of live action in convincing photographic detail.

Film and video have always been used to spin out fantasies that speak to our fears and desires. But it is a newer twist to mask the fake in reproductions that are plausibly real. Will newer generations have the skills to detect plausible but fanaticized reproductions? Can a culture function when source authenticity is always in doubt? More than ever need the solid anchor of conversing with people in real time and space.