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Media Literacy

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More than Meets the Eye

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a la Shmoop

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We're covering More than Meets the Eye.

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Topic is images in mass media.

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And we all know images can be changed a lot.

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Thank you Photoshop and Adobe,

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you can advertise right here.

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So, Deb, talk to us about what kind of images we find in mass media.

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Structure the process for us.

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I mean, images are everywhere in mass media, right?

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Unless we're just reading straight texts,

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like a newspaper article, images are everywhere.

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So we have -- TV and movies are obviously mostly images.

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Even things like a billboard, that's mass media.

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And then of course, magazines and newspapers have images

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in them, not just on the covers,

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but in advertisements.

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And, you know, the advertisements are in print and onscreen.

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So basically, any time you see something that is not a word,

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you're looking at an image in mass media.

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So it's a huge component of mass media.

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They say the camera doesn't lie.

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Is that true?

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How are images constructed?

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So, yeah, there are a bunch of different ways

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to manipulate images.

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[ whoop ]

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[ pop ]

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[ oh yeah! ]

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So let's talk about a few of those different ways.

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One of them is cropping.

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That's a pretty simple one.

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Again, anyone can do this on their computer at home.

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Take a picture, there's two people in it,

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cut one of them out, now there's just one person.

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That's fine for me to do

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if I'm making it my Facebook photo.

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But if there's an image in the news

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and you have... Let's say

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the president of the United States is jovially laughing.

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Little do you know that cut out of that picture

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is some poor suffering child in Africa.

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So that changes the picture, right?

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So cropping is a big one.

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Another one is juxtaposing.

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So same if you put the picture of a really wealthy American

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16-year-old next to a starving 16-year-old

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in another country. Then it's not just like,

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"Oh, hey look! This is a normal 16-year-old girl."

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Instead it's like, "Oh, wow. We're spoiled." or, "We need to help these other people."

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Then there's just manipulating images more generally.

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Things like touching them up,

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making celebrities look better than they actually do.

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These kinds of adjustments that we make to images are actually really --

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We have to be really careful of them,

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especially in things like advertisements, right?

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Where someone might have

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a picture of a celebrity

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drinking a Gatorade or something like that.

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Little do we know, the next thing they did

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was spit it out because they thought it was gross.

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But all we see is the picture.

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So it's just -- You kind of always have to be aware of

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the context of what might be surrounding the image.

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And not just what's taken out or put into the image,

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but how the image itself has been changed.

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It's not just adding and subtracting features;

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it's actually changing what was in the image to begin with.

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[ whoop ]

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What kind of images do we find in mass media?

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They say the camera doesn't lie.

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Is that true? How are images constructed?

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[ oh yeah! ]

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