"Can you believe your eyes in a digital world?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10558258

I read this article for my ITGS course and it got me thinking about its relation with TOK and how sight is or isn't a way of knowing in the digital world nowadays. This article is published in BBC and written by Zoe Kleinman who is a technology reporter. The article states that in present day, any picture can be "digitally altered to tell an entirely different story" (Kleinman1). These include photoshopped images of presidents on beaches to airbrushed models. There have also been cases where experts have been fired for spreading false rumours due to surreal editing leading people to believe a "fake" story is true. Technology is developing by the day and it gets more and more difficult to identify whether a picture has been tampered with or not. Thus professors have to continue evolving methods to recognize if it is. I feel this could be a huge ethical issue now because it is demonstrating an artificial reality to people. Years ago, it was easy to see whether a picture was photoshopped or not due to poor skills but now it is getting increasingly hard with people that are experts at merging photos together and changing backgrounds professionally. So the question that arises in the article is, can we ever really believe our eyes? In technology or the digital world as it is referred to, I don't think we can. Everything is altered in a way to manipulate or deceive us, from advertisements to even news such as a magazine cover of The Economist featuring Obama alone with an oil spill which was actually a picture taken of him on a beach with two other people. It has come to the point where anything we see in print media cannot be believed solely on the basis of looking at it. Knowledge from digital media has now become difficult to attain as a result of this. A situation just took place where fans saw a photo of Justin Bieber smoking and they all started a ridiculous cult to cut for him so that he would stop. It began to trend on twitter as well and more and more people were posting about it, obviously comprising of the obsessed 11 year old girls. This caused quite a scare as things were getting serious over someone editing a photo of Justin Bieber as a joke they probably deemed harmless, but it deeply affected the adolescent girls and they were going overboard with this. To illustrate how these knowledge claims are taken too seriously and have consequences is when Brian Walski got fired from LA Times because he "composited" or combined two pictures together that changed the meaning. Both the pictures featured a soldier who was  leading civilians but one of them had a man carrying a child in the background. Walski had combined them in such a way that it looked as if the soldier was holding out his hand to stop the main with the child. This was something that had not even taken place and by editing the picture as such he was leading people to believe something else amidst the Basra conflict because it was not in the soldier's intentions to stop the man with the child. This caused Walski to get fired from La Times. I feel that this situation demonstrates the severity of the power of editing and that it is consequential enough to get someone fired because they are convincing the whole world of something that is not true. Sight, I would say for the most part, is not a way of knowing in the digital world because it only provides us with a misrepresentation of how things actually are.

Language as a WOK in History

In our history class, we received some documents regarding the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip who worked for a Serb terrorist organization called The Black Hand. What was interesting about these documents was that it was the same event reported but by two different sources. One of them was from an eyewitness from The Black Hand so it was a Serbian source. The other comes from the perspective of Austria-Hungary. Each source has a different way of telling the story. The events are the same, but the language used demonstrates their bias affecting what the reader might gain from reading it.
The first source is what Jevtic, the co-conspirator of the assassination, has to say about this who had worked alongside Princip in this operation. He states that when they found out that archduke Franz Ferdinand would be arriving on the 28th of June, they were furious. It reads, "How dared Franz Ferdinand, not only the representative of the oppressor but in his own person an arrogant tyrant, enter Sarajevo on that day? Such an entry was a studied insult." This demonstrates that this is why Serbians were so aggravated. Not only had Austria Hungary occupied their territory but now they were sending their Archduke on their national day too? Jevtic goes on to say that "Princip is destined to go down in Serbian history as one of her greatest heroes" telling readers that they this was something of utmost pride for the Serbs and that it was a very bold and considerable act. At Princip's first attempt, the Archduke "threw himself back and was uninjured." Later as Ferdinand was turning a corner, Jevtic states, "Here, he [Princip] had taken his stand." Jevtic even included that Princip's last regret was that he had also shot Ferdinand's wife as a mistake while aiming for her husband.
The second source from Austria Hungary has a different approach. Just by looking at the title that states, "Heir to Austria's Throne is Slain with His Wife by a Bosnian Youth." The word "slain" has automatic negative connotations and the picture that comes to mind is a massacre or slaughter, and not simply a gunshot. Next, when it the Autro-Hungarian article talks about the Princip's first attempt at throwing a bomb at Ferdinand's motor car, it says that the Archduke "pushed it off with his arm." This makes it seem as if Ferdinand was on top of things and saved his own life so courageously, whereas from the Serbian perspective it had said that Archduke had thrown himself back, making it appear as if he did that to defend himself, almost caught off guard. This illustrates how language differs according to the source and how that affects our perception of what actually took place. Additionally, where the second successful attempt took place, this article states that "the chauffeur took a wrong turning. Quite by chance, Princip was standing in that very street." This differs from the Serbian article which said "Here, he [Princip] had taken his stand" portraying that it was not a coincidence, he had been there for  reason and does not say anything about the chauffeur taking a wrong turn.
These two sources have a different way of looking at the same events as expressed through the language they have used. Serbia makes Princip come across as a hero and shows hate towards Ferdinand, whereas Austria-Hungary says their duke got slain and that he fought with courage by deflecting the bomb the first time only for misfortune that Princip found them again. If they had been read individually, it would have a great impact on the reader's way of perceiving the events, but because we read both as well as an objective article from London, we were able to tell where they had deployed the language to suit what they wanted to convey.

Language as a WOK

One of the most famous songs of all time is Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. We learned about how the meaning of a text can change through translation of the language. Considered as one of the most eloquent songs, I decided to apply a translation to my own language and see how the meaning differs and provides a misinterpretation to us. Just by looking at the first line which states, "there's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold," as English speakers either natively or having learnt it over the years, we gather that the phrase means that everything that seems valuable is, contrary to the popular saying, "all that glitters is not gold." Led Zeppelin is saying that the woman he is speaking about is certain that whatever she sees as precious is actually as great as she perceives it, demonstrating her naivety. Now if the same line were translated into Urdu, it would have a quite literal and ambiguous meaning which would throw Urdu readers off and not give them the same meaning that Led Zeppelin originally intended. Since this figurative language is not used by Urdu speakers, a literal translation would make the meaning absurd, directly implying that the whatever the woman sees as sparkling is in fact, gold. In addition, the word "gold" translates to an equivocation with two very distinct meanings in urdu. It means to sleep as well as gold. So it could be misinterpreted as whatever the woman sees glittering she sees it as asleep.