Image is a complicated subject. In the media and technology it can mean anything from a group of pixels you are looking at (a physical image) to the idea you have about a person (their “image”). Technology including the internet have helped moved both of these forward in new directions. We have the ability to have more pixels in a single imagine than ever before, and celebrities have the ability to alter their “image” on any given day whether on purpose or not.

In the subsection of Mitchell’s Image called The Digital Image, he addresses some concerns with the way that digital images have changed and expanded over time. One of these concerns relates to the “realness” of it all. One of the arguments is that in the transition from chemicals and film to pixels in creating an image, some element of “realism” is lost. I could not disagree with this idea more. What is that makes old school photography more real? The fact that you can touch it? That may be true, but new school digital photography allows images to have more detail and be more precise. How is that less real? At one point in time, the only images we had were paintings. Are those more real that pixels? I think this argument is based in the idea that since we can’t touch it, it’s not real. The internet world is not real. You’re ideas aren’t real, etc. But when talking about images specifically, this seems absurd to me. With today’s technology, you can zoom in on images until you see individual leaves on trees. If anything, that makes it more real. At least in my opinion.

This all goes back to my frequent rant on how the online world and the real world are the same world, thinking back to a video we watched in class that Chris had posted on his blog. The separation between online and offline is such a subjective thing, it makes it very difficult to study. My ideas back at the very beginning of the class about integration also relate to this. Using my old hair brush metaphor….if I bought a new hair brush that had some type of technology that brushed my hair for me, would that make it less real? Not in my opinion. My hair would be still be getting brushed, I would still have something to do with it, and maybe I would have better hair styles. It’s the same thing as the digital images. Digital images are just more automated and more detailed, but they are not any less real.