Colette Cassinelli's List: iimm

Media are the most powerful cultural forces on the planet. Millions of people watch, read and listen for hours a day. In developing countries, people's lives are transformed as media become part of their culture. Media's benefits are accompanied by these concerns:

Fewer voices, as media ownership is consolidated in the hands of fewer than 10 wealthy individuals and global corporations
News bias and public relations spin
Violence packaged as entertainment
Children and teens targeted by corporate advertisers
Digital photo and film manipulation
Media effects on community and personal relationships

How do you help your students succeed in a media-filled world? Do they know how media is created? Can they analyze the messages that inform, entertain, and sell to us everyday? Have they created their own media messages?

The Center for Media Literacy (CML) is an educational organization that provides leadership, public education, professional development and educational resources nationally and internationally. Dedicated to promoting and supporting media literacy education as a framework for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating and participating with media content, CML works to help citizens, especially the young, develop critical thinking and media production skills needed to live fully in the 21st century media culture.

Photo Tampering Throughout History
Photography lost its innocence many years ago. Only a few decades after Niepce created the first photograph in 1814, photographs were already being manipulated. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of photos is becoming more common. Here, I have collected some examples of photo tampering throughout history. To help contend with the implications of this tampering, we have developed a series of tools for detecting traces of photo tampering.

Photographs have always been manipulated. Usually the results have not been big whopper lies, pictures that claimed something happened when it didn't, but less serious sins, touch-ups in ads and portraits. The tabloids have always used a bag of photographic tricks.