Pics Or It Didn’t Happen?

Okay, first, who goes to this much work to cosplay? And second, what the odds that they could get kids that looked that much like young versions of the actors.

Pretty poor, as it turns out.

The above picture is fake. Everything about it. The kids don’t exist. It never happened. But, it LOOKS real.

There was a time when pictures didn’t lie. In fact, photographs were considered so accurate that they were accepted as evidence in court. At least they were if you had the negatives.

I suppose you could fake a negative, but you’d need very sophisticated equipment. Negatives WERE the picture. They were the gold standard for security and verification.

That was before cell phones, and digital photos. Digital photos, of course, can be faked. There’s even a word for it, “Photoshopped.”

The above picture takes it a step further. It’s not just photoshopped, it’s based off a real photograph. The actors really posed like these kids. In fact, this photograph is NOT of kids. It’s a picture of the actual actors.

Here’s the original.

The internet brought us the world’s information at our fingertips. All of history lies open to us. The most obscure piece of movie or science trivia is a click away. The sum total of scientific knowledge is within our grasp. . .literally if we are using a cell phone.

But, nothing is free. Along with the real, we get the fake. With the truth we get lies. And if we don’t know truth from lies, we suffer at the expense of whomever will tell us the best, most convincing story.

In many ways we are worse off. We have to decide for ourselves if what we are seeing is true. And how do we know? How can we tell?

We can’t. The best we can do is reverse google image searches. We can investigate. But, ultimately we are left to guessing.

I remember when photographs didn’t lie.

Stay safe

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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