ANTM

When I think about digital alteration, the show America's Next Top Model immediately comes to mind. It's a group of women competing to become the winner of a model agency contract and the next "Covergirl". They have a photo shoot every week and Tyra Banks, the host, chooses the picture she thinks is the best for each girl. There is never a picture that isn't altered in some way, so the models never really know exactly how they look behind the camera. Each picture is beautiful in it's own way, and even if a model isn't that pretty without the makeup and lights, their picture is always stunning. I don't find it fair that they're getting paid to take pictures and look a certain way, but all their pictures are touched up to make them look perfect. As long as they're tall and skinny, I feel like almost anyone can do what they do.

Manipulation

When it comes to picture manipulation, digital media has made it extremely easy to change pictures in such a slight way that sometimes it's too realistic to even notice. On the other hand, it's also easy to create something that looks aesthetically pleasing, but are clearly unrealistic. For example:


It's obvious that this isn't a real picture, but it looks really neat just the same.



Now, it's a lot harder to tell that something has been done to this picture. For fashion, they manipulate pictures all the time to make people look a certain way. Just by shaping her eyebrows, changing the color of her lips and eyeshadow, and softening her skin's appearance, she is transformed into a more pleasing look. Nowadays with magazines for instance, young girls are misinformed about how they are supposed to look. They see pictures of models that are completely manipulated, making it seem like they're just naturally missing shoulder blades, have a perfect tan, ridiculously flat stomachs, and so on. No one really looks like that, not even the models that are in the pictures. By changing the way we look, we're giving false impressions and making people, especially young girls, feel like they have to look a certain way.

Music

Today we talked about music a bit and it was pretty interesting because most people nowadays know the big bands and all the popular singers that are on the radio. However, what is there out there to help us find new music? Personally, I am always on Imeem and Pandora. These two sites are ways to listen to the music you know and find related music that are more undercover and unheard of. Pandora is especially cool because if you type in an artist or a song, it will create a radio station that has songs with the same melodies. You can use sites such as Limewire or Bearshare to download songs, but they're not able to search for new music based on what you already like. I'd like to think that I know a wide variety of music and a lot of that has to do with digital media. Without sites like Imeem or Pandora, there's really no other way that I would be able to find new bands or artists as easily as I do.

Future robots?

I've been thinking about where humans are headed since class on Tuesday. All the talk about chips inplanted in the head, eye cameras, and other things that basically transform humans into computers...aka, robots. There are so many movies out there that depict what life would be like if robots were here-- the top 5 according to the Times Online are 5. Robocop, 4. Virtuosity, 3. Knight Rider, 2. A Space Odyssey (2001), and 1. The Terminator. There's a list of 50 movies with robots, 50! Apparently film directors are already ahead in the times and are creating what they believe the world could be like with robots. I'm not such a big fan of robots. Sure, they're cool and can do things more efficiently, quicker, and so on...but I look at it as people becoming even more lazy. Unless there's a good reason we need robots around, I don't think they should just take over peoples' jobs. It's scary to think about humans becoming the robots, which is an entirely different thing. If little things were programmed into our brains and other parts to make us robotic, wouldn't we all be the same? The point is to be different from one another, so why try to make us all alike? It might be cool at first to take pictures from your eye and store them in your brain, but the newness and uniqueness of it fade quickly because everyone can do it. If robots are where technology is headed, count me out.