How photos support your own “reality” – Machinist – Salon.com:
In the decades since Kennedy’s death, we’ve achieved photographic ubiquity. Today, billions of tiny cameras record everything, and broadcast it all immediately online. The world, now, is constantly watched, each of us Zapruder himself.
Strangely, though, all these images have not pushed us toward greater collective agreement about what has happened, or what is happening, in the major controversies of the day. Sept. 11 is a primary exhibit, but in other issues, too, photos seem to prompt more disagreement than agreement: Images did not settle, for instance, what really happened between American and Iranian boats on the Strait of Hormuz in January. Indeed, the brilliant pictures that now come at us daily often only blur the truth, casting reality itself wide open for debate.
One cause of this is a phenomenon psychologists call “selective perception”…
An interesting article on how we interpret images. It brings to mind one of the kookiest presentations I ever saw, a talk by William Cooper (author of Behold a Pale While Horse) who explained how JFK’s driver shot the prez. He looped the video over and over again to the point that if he said jackie O did it, I would have believed him. Anyhow, 9-11 has spurned a cottage industry of photographic “evidence,” but the problem is that in the age of digital photography, it simply does not exist. This being a visual culture, it’s surprising that a belief in god is still so strong given the lack of visual proof. Nevertheless, images still are the most potent propaganda weapons, but depend greatly on context, which means either captioning, framing or presenting them in such a way that any sense of objectivity is impossible due to the mere act of suggestion.
Electronic motes anyone? Designed like something straight out of 
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