photography plays a dangerous part

The power of photography.  One image, used with the intent to  create chaos can disrupt innocent lives. actually destroy lives and threaten the very fabric of nation hood.  

That captions can change even the objective , photographic  content  framed by photographs is something  I have realised and worked  against since my media days. Using text within the frame and writing my own texts  was my answer then  .In the  new virtual world of our  digital duniya  that may not be enough.   The madness of power of  photography can't really be controlled. by anyone, it seems. 

"In mid-July this year, a Pakistani news portal, columnpk.com, carried an image of Buddhist monks wearing masks amid a sea of mutilated bodies. It turned out that the image was of the July 2010 earthquake in Tibet where the monks were engaged in relief work.

But the portal carried the image with the tag “The body of Muslims slaughtered by Buddhist Barma [Myanmar].” By the time protests from the Tibetan groups forced the portal to withdraw the image, the damage was ostensibly done.

The image went viral on the Internet and two weeks ago it found its way into the pages of a local Urdu newspaper, which also passed it off as proof of Muslim persecution in Myanmar. This image, along with a copy of the Urdu periodical, was presented to the Karnataka government as part of a dossier submitted by the northeast groups here on Thursday. There were emails and text messages calling on people to avenge the deaths in Assam and Myanmar."
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/article3781473.ece

“We believe it is highly reprehensible …it needs to be made known to everybody that [the morphing and uploading] is something that is being done from Pakistan. The bulk of it has been done from Pakistan…our teams are certain of the findings and we will take up [the] issue with Pakistan. ”

http://www.thehindu.com/news/article3792617.ece?homepage=true

“Under British rule, rumour-mongers and ‘history sheeters’ were rounded up in the hope that this would quell unrest. If the colonial regime suppressed local newspapers, today the government has banned mass text and multimedia messages.

However something has changed — radically. In the last decade, the media ecology of India has radically changed. Around 700 million Indians have cellular phones that now receive and produce text, video, audio and digital images. After the advent of the cellular phone, a growing section of the population is now the source of new media output — that in turn links to online social networks, mainstream television (through ‘citizen’ journalism), and peer-to-peer exchanges of text, music and video. Proliferation is fundamental to our time, information has value only if it has some velocity and is exchanged. Information once collected, always moves, at some point. The cellular phone has become a transmitter and media production device: activists capture police brutality and protests, ordinary people enter the world of mass photography and share them with their friends. These massive expansions of the newer media infrastructures have thrown the old control models of the regime into disarray: this is a population of potential media producers, not just an uneducated mass to be nurtured by the government and traditional media for a ‘genuine’ enlightened citizenship.

The mobile phone is the archive of our recent memory - phone numbers, images of loved ones, favourite songs. In countries like India with a young media population, it is the first technological device that many working people encounter — hence its great intimacy and potential power. Witness the images and videos of police atrocities around the country taken by ordinary citizens, the massacre videos from Kashmir and Syria. Add to this everyday scams, bribe takers caught on phone camera — the phone has effectively destabilised classic forms of informational power. Older media like television remain powerful but increasingly fragile — hence the nervous hysterics of television anchors. The TV screen now pleads our attention all the time, through phone polls, ‘citizen’ journalism, and brand media events.

Simply attacking uneducated readers, or fabrications will not do; we have to enter this media ecology and engage with it. Shutting down social media or the mobile phone networks is stupid, and rhetorical, it won’t last a day. Censorship is a nineteenth century technology, it won’t work today. If the government spent less time massaging the egos of large media networks, and came to grips with this changed world we could see quicker interventions, and fewer panics than we have seen recently.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3792723.ece