Saturday, May 9, 2015

Video Trickery, Computers and the Internet

Regarding citizen videos, at present there's a large gap which needs to be dealt with, and it's a gap of gullibility regarding computers, the internet and video trickery.

I think there are a lot of tricks the public in general needs to be reminded about. If you need a history of them, I don't know how far back you want to go but I think about the TV show 60 Minutes, because it became clear they'd interview someone and then replace the questions they really asked them later with shots of them asking different but similar questions. Subtle manipulations.

Another I've thought of is the one where you are shown a video, it's said that this is a view of, for example, a police raid during the aftermath of the Boston bombing, but in reality it's a video of some other police interaction at a different time and perhaps place. taken at the usual distance, i.e., fairly far away. How would one know? How often have you watched one and assumed its provenance was as indicated, yet with no reason to really believe it?

Sequencing is often played with. One event is shown, then another, and the viewer assumes that at the actual event, this happened, one-two, just like that. Yet if there was any cut from a scene, it's possible the video was edited to suppress knowledge of intervening events or situations.
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Lately we've seen actual political stunts pulled like this. The O'Keefe ACORN video was done like that.

One of Obama's employees got fired in a separate incident for out-of-context video.

People are believing video which should not be necessarily believed.

Once this gullibility is fixed, we can proceed with the transparency progress.