Link via PBS.org
During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. These images often got passed along via e-mail or posted on blogs as a way of enlivening political debates. Like classic editorial cartoons, they paint in broad strokes, trying to forge powerful images or complex sets of associations that encapsulate more complex ideas. In many cases, they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape. Many of them explore the borderlands between popular culture and American politics. I called this “Photoshop for Democracy” and the ideas got expanded in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.
I thought back on my arguments there this past week as I’ve begun to search out some of the images being generated in response to John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Given the intense flood of news coverage around this decision, the ways that it has shaken up the terms of the campaign, and the ways that it challenges gender assumptions surrounding the Republican leadership, it is no surprise that it has provoked a range of response. And I thought it might be interesting to dissect some of these images here.
Photoshop CS3 Extended is available at an academic discount price of $295.
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