Just today I came across an interesting story that I never heard before that goes along with our class assignment. Apparently a group of scientists were taking the image analysis thing a little too far by taking nude posture photos of all incoming freshmen at Ivy League schools. They thought they could determine social, intellectual, and economic outcomes based on body type. The scientists felt that by studying the bodies of those admitted to these top schools they could breed a super race, the idea for this came from studies conducted by the Nazis in World War II.
While I agree that pictures will tell us quite a bit about a person I don’t think this is one of those things. I don’t think you would be able to create a whole new class of individuals just by comparing waist sizes. At times I feel that we over-analyze situations, on one hand it is a good idea to delve into the background and backstory in order to find the deeper meaning but I sometimes wonder if we are missing the mark. Are we delving too deep, isn’t it possible that a picture of a family is just that, a picture of the family with no special meaning. Maybe the picture just works better with the parents sitting down with the kids standing around them versus the parents standing and the kids sitting. Of course Star Wars was probably just meant to be a good entertaining movie and not an epic story of good vs evil and the redemption of a fallen man.
We already have plenty of people taking everything at face value--it's easy, and it doesn't require much energy. Most people will see a picture as just a picture because that's the easiest way to see it--it takes skill (critical, analytic, and reflective skill) to use the photo to learn something about the people in it, or the person who took it. There might not be "special meaning" or "a true meaning," but there is always "more" meaning. To me, a blink and a swallow are a blink and a swallow; but to a trained FBI profiler, they can mean much more than dry eyes and mouth. To many, a racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious joke is "just funny;" but someone with a good education is able to see how destructive the joke is. Star Wars is an entertaining film--but can't we still use it as a tool to learn something about the people who watched it? Certainly, if we know how.
ReplyDeleteAs for the scientists you mentioned, I would be interested to know exactly what kind of "scientists" they were. Immediate red flag if they were trying to build any social understanding from what was learned by the Nazis.
Here's a link to an article about the posture pictures.
ReplyDeletehttp://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990ce7d91131f936a25752c0a963958260
That's a bit troubling--it is interesting to see how much our views have changed (hopefully?) in the past 60 years.
ReplyDelete