What is seen is not always what is real (June 22)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
A fascinating thing is going on in Iran. We are learning much — perhaps a majority — of all we know about the public reaction to the recent presidential elections there from cell phone callers.
These callers take photos of what is going on around them, and the photos wind up on television and in newspapers. Some of those cell phone callers also use the application Twitter to send out their impressions of what is going on.
A similar thing happened in China in 1989 when protests in Tiananmen Square were described in e-mails from China to free nations around the world.
The widespread use of cell phones with cameras in them has made it nearly impossible for anyplace where cell phone technology is in use to be immune from public disclosure of bad behavior, or any behavior, for that matter.
Yet, it is important to realize that what we see and hear from such devices do not necessarily tell the whole story.
One of the basic rules of general semantics is that the word is not the thing it describes, and that the same thing holds true for photos.
For example, photos of some of the idiots celebrating after the victory of the Los Angeles Lakers in the final game of the NBA championships could have led some people to believe that Los Angeles was in the hands of rioters and was on fire. The fact is, most Los Angeles residents, home safe and sound, probably didn’t know or care what was going on downtown after the game.
Do the demonstrations in Tehran portend another Iranian revolution, as the cell phone images could lead one to believe, or are we just seeing a few thousand people with nothing else to do out raising a fuss?
We are prone to believe the former, but the latter could be just as true, based on what we’ve seen so far. Pictures can be misleading.
