Digital Imagery Week 2

1. How do digital images play a role in your day to day life?
In today's world, digital images are everywhere. They're on billboards, our phones, and all our other smart devices. For me as an artist, they are even more prevalent as I take this class about media arts.

2. How do digital images play a role in your personal life?
 Whether or not I want them to, digital images play into my personal life all of the time. Social media is everywhere and it effects how we perceive our friends, our families and ourselves. Perfectly posed and edited photos set a standard for what we except in our personal lives.

3. How do digital images play a role in the way you experience your world?
I feel like all three of these questions have very similar answers... Similarly to how digit images in social media effect our personal lives, it effects the way we experience the world. A good example of this is the person at a concert who watches the entire show through the screen of their phone. That persons experience of that event is very different from the person who actually enjoyed the moment. All for the sake of capturing photos and videos to share on social media.

4. Thoughts on ethics and aesthetics as it relates to digital imagery manipulation?
This is a huge problem for me. Nature is beautiful all on its own, it does not need to be touched up or edited. All we are doing by making these edits is changing what we perceive as beautiful and making that standard unattainable. It really bothers me that they touch up animals. The one article talks about sheep that had to be edited to look whiter. As a girl that grew up around farms, I can tell you that sheep are not white. Why would we even expect them to be white; They live in barns.

5. What are your thoughts on these manipulated photos?
Some of the photos don't bother me too much, for example the photo at Kent State. Removing the fence pole from above the woman's head does not really change the focus of the photo, it just makes it look nicer. However, most of the other photos that are important historical photos should not be edited. We should not be able to sensor out people from history, if we do not learn from it the first time, we are destine to make the same mistakes.

6. Which of the examples is the most impactful?
The picture of Ulysses Grant during the civil war sticks in my mind because it is actually three separate photos. I think it's even more so disturbing that this photo from the civil war in 1864 was edited. At least in today's world we expect images to be manipulated... the general public in 1864 probably did not even know it was possible to alter a photo. That fact alone somehow makes the manipulation worse.