Photography and visual imagery are a facsimile of reality; a reality that can never convey the absolute essence of the present moment when an image was captured.
Photography tricks the mind into a bias. Context and framing are an image makers subjective tools used to convey meaning that will inevitably deceive. We cannot genuinely experience anything in the future or past, as a photograph would intend; we can only reflect or speculate--ultimately, we are prisoners of the present.
In Gunkel’s and Hawhee’s article in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Virtual Alterity and the Reformatting of Ethics, many prescient considerations in regard to the "deception" of technology and humanity are addressed. Gunkel and Hawhee question the rationale we use to delineate man from machine, and man from animal, where animals have become equated to machines because of their assumed inability to reason.
Reason, perhaps inappropriately, became the chosen delineator between humans and animals. Scholastics mistranslated or misconstrued the definitional nuance of the Greek term for human into Latin resulting in animal rationale, or reason, as the differentiating characteristic between man and beast (Gunkel & Hawhee, 2003).
From this “linch pin” came the basis for the study of the philosophy of ethics.
Gunkel & Hawhee write that Immanuel Kant furthered the basis for reason as being the theoretical framework for ethics, citing his Critique of Practical Reason. Kant argues that "what is ethical is necessarily reasonable and what is reasonable is necessarily ethical" drawing an explicit connection between the two terms and creating a "standard operating procedure" for the study of ethics.
Gunkel & Hawhee triangulate between humans, animals and machines with reason as the axis around which our understanding of these three "beings" turns. They cite Nietzsche and Foucault as the initial sustaining critics of the human, who clearly define that the human is in opposition to others "in a border war fought on two fronts, against two forms of the non- or in- human -- the animal and the machine" (Gunkel & Hawhee, 2003).
This thinking eventually leads Descartes in the Discourse on Method to characterize animals as clockwork mechanisms (Gunkel & Hawhee, 2003) further marking the line between humans and their others and equating the animal to the machine, characterizing their sameness.
But twentieth century (and contemporary) developments altered the triangular dynamic in uniquely significant ways. Progressive philosophers began to question the origin of the institutional framework for ethics; reason as the delineator between man and animal is not as defensible as it once was.
Donna Haraway's seminal essay about cyborg theory, A Cyborg Manifesto: "Simians, Cyborgs and Women," questioned the distinguisher of reason as the accepted mechanism for delineation, arguing that humans and machines had become hopelessly intertwined, distinguishing machines as "disturbingly lively" and humans as "frighteningly inert." She also claimed that "the boundary between human and animal had become thoroughly breached" (Gunkel & Hawhee, 2003).
So if these boundaries are suddenly up for grabs where does our context for ethics come from? How is it defined? "In other words, what becomes of the subject of ethics, when it is no longer subject to the human subject?" (Gunkel & Hawhee, 2003).
If humans have transmogrified with machines, as Haraway suggests, we are now being ruled by our in-human. Practically speaking, our lives are subordinate to the rationale of the machine, superseding the rationale of the human. Anthropomorphism is a moot point.
It would be relatively easy to now consider how technology and "the computer" have become completely intertwined with our existence, so much so that we have begun to think in terms of the cyborg.
Databases, wireless networks, satellite connectivity, visual monitors and cameras further connected us to the "deception" of the mirror image, the reality that an image of something does not represent its true essence. That a photograph is ultimately a conceit leads us to a misunderstanding of "truth" where we are subordinate to machines and merged with them in the form of the cyborg.
This means all bets based on the traditional ethical framework are off. Ethics need to be redefined in cohesion with the cyborg's world -- essentially with the triangulation turning into one single un-delineated axis. Under these terms the idea of Virtual Reality is redundant because the virtual is reality. And the mirror image of the self begins to confuse its actual essence or, in actuality, becomes the true essence.
These truths have become our context for photography and visual imagery. Whether the trickery of the photographic image has ultimately linked us to a merging with the machine, resulting in the cyborg, or if the reality of merging with the machine has tainted our understanding of reality through a visual image in a photograph, or through a monitor, is inconsequential.
When Hippolyte Bayard altered the first photograph in 1840 (Lester, 1999), the usefulness of his new found tool created an explicit path toward the emergence of the cyborg. Yet what he did not realize, and what few photographers even realize today, is that the creation of the first photograph was, albeit implicitly, the first step toward the cyborg's emergence.
Our understanding of reality is seen through an endless filter that is intrinsically manipulative. The ascendancy of media and the photograph, which is only a single frame of rapid movement, has become the trickster within our midst. It has changed the landscape of human understanding, placing truth in a mirror that refuses to give us the whole story. Image capture, the attempt to freeze the present, is a contradictory exercise and a curiously ironic term.
The internet and social media have exacerbated the prevalence of the trickster in our midst, and given the cyborg more freedom to control our reality. A computer computes algorithms and code to create its environment, but ultimately the computer is a euphemism for the cyborg, and its simulating nature winds us ever more tightly into our relationship with the machine.
All a computer can provide to humans is a visual image in multitudinous forms. The level of deception is magnified to such an extent that it has replaced our understanding of reality and become our benchmark for truth. Virtual worlds are not virtual anymore. They are integrated with our reality. We are perceiving websites, blogs, email, word processing--all of the processes of which technology and the computer avails itself--as “genuine” communication.
The "facsimile of reality" is now reality. What comes next?
References
Gunkel D. & Hawhee, D. (2003) Virtual alterity and the reformatting of ethics. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 18(3&4), 173-193
Lester P. (1999) Photojournalism an ethical approach. Chapter Six Picture Manipulations. Retrieved from http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/chapter6.html
Illusory images of the cyborg
What about the past? A snapshot of the present becomes a moment in the past and a teaching for the future.
Cyborg to me means to assimilate, to become one of the same.
Technology is a tool just like a hammer. When we become a blunt object we are then the tool.
Seems to me that some people are creaters of tools and some people who emulate those tools through mimicking