digital photography-helping or harming society?

[rtscribbs02]

I was just wondering what everyone thinks:

Is digital photography helping or harming our society?

 

[The_Traveler]

Still looking for a topic?
http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81525

 

[panocho]

why should it do either both things? What are you really thinking on?

 

[table1349]

No, quasi-philosophers tired of debating a tree falling in the woods are.

 

[Alex_B]

I was just wondering what everyone thinks:

Is digital photography helping or harming our society?

it is the actions of humans which do good or bad, not the tools they use...

 

[Mike_E]

It Helps!

Anything that keeps people's minds off doing mean nasty things to each other is a good thing!

(hums.. you can get anything you want at alice's res...

mike

 

[deanimator]

For:
* Keeps quite a few people employed.
* Possibly with less film being used it keeps some poisons out of our drinking water.

Against:
* It´s easier to manipulate (create "wrong" images)

There are many other things to consider, but you asked for philosophical input.

 

[rtscribbs02]

Still looking for a topic?
http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81525

No, i decided to write about what photos mean to different people and how they affect people. I was just asking the question because that was one of the topics I thought of to maybe write a paper on. I decided not to do it because I wasn't sure how difficult it would be to write, and I couldn't make up my mind as to whether it is harming or helping our society.

 

[montresor]

Digital photography is just one variation of a single creative act, which is photography. You might as well ask if pinhole photography, or wet-plate collodion photography, or car-bro photography hurts or helps society. If you asked, does photography help or hurt society, there might be an answer, in that good photography tells the truth, whether artistic or documentary or journalistic, or some combination thereof. Bad photography does not so much lie as miss the truth (except in the case of manipulated propaganda photos, which are lies), and generally does no real harm, as bad pictures simply drop out of sight. Good pictures live and enrich those who view them. It doesn't matter what process produced them.

So you see, there's still a topic for a paper here if you think you might want to give it a shot!

 

[The_Traveler]

Good pictures live and enrich those who view them. It doesn't matter what process produced them.

Leni Riefenstahl

 

[morydd]

one way in which digital can be a benefit to society is that it enables a similar kind of "citizen journalism" to develop. Thereby making it much harder for "the powers that be" to abuse their power. Like video cameras, blogs, etc. It's much harder for abuses to stay covered up when witnesses can easily record and disseminate proof. While the overflow of amateurs can be detrimental to the art side of photography (I'm not convinced this is true!) it can be a great boon to accountability.

 

[The_Traveler]

one way in which digital can be a benefit to society is that it enables a similar kind of "citizen journalism" to develop. Thereby making it much harder for "the powers that be" to abuse their power. Like video cameras, blogs, etc. It's much harder for abuses to stay covered up when witnesses can easily record and disseminate proof. While the overflow of amateurs can be detrimental to the art side of photography (I'm not convinced this is true!) it can be a great boon to accountability.

good point.

and the concomitant rise of the internet makes dispersal of the electronic media that much easier.

 

[deanimator]

An important question then: Is the world therefore now a better place???

 

[Alex_B]

An important question then: Is the world therefore now a better place???

no, as via the internet it is also easy to spread so much rubbish ... and to sell heavily biased views of things as the ultimate truth.

and everyone ... even those with no background knowledge about anything they see and hear can comment on it and sell it to millions of people.

 

[montresor]

Leni Riefenstahl

...was not a process. See my note on propaganda photos. LR was a photographer whose pictures lied and therefore are beyond the scope of my comments.