PICTURE DON'T SAY EVERYTHING

-Malsawm Kipgen

The phrase Picture dont say everything may be defined as the inability of a picture to carry a complete information.  A picture can be of two types: good picture and bad one. You can assume that a good picture can speak a thousand words. But can you say for sure that the bad one also has the same potentiality to speak a thousand words? As it turns out, a picture doesnt necessarily say a thousand words.

In this present generation where internet rules our lives, we cannot ignore the fact that texts still continue to dominate the content of the page. The Internet  or more specifically the World Wide Web  has revolutionized the way we publish and consume information. One of the most noticeable innovations fostered by the Web was the ability to mix text with other media such as pictures and videos, which led to the birth and success of companies like Flickr, imgur, Instagram, YouTube and DailyMotion. The ability to publish multimedia content has been a driver of other paradigm shifts in our behavior, such as online shopping; where would Flipkart be without product images?

However, it is easy to overlook the fact that text still dominates online information exchange. The vast majority of activities we do online are still fundamentally based on reading text: social media, news, search, e-mail, product reviews and many others. It has been estimated that more than 80% of the activities we do online are text-based. While many of these online activities are enhanced by multimedia content, the bulk of the information still comes from text, and thats unlikely ever to change.

 In this age of modern technology sharing pictures are as easy as drawing an apple by a class VII standard. The pictures share in social media especially on facebook regarding news photo clip by so called facebook journalists wanna be famous can be sometimes questionable. Bad peoples are everywhere. They have also invaded facebook. Many have fallen prey to the fox in sheeps skin picture of these cunning people. These people are generally operating from outside India. They used faked pictures as an instrument to extract money from the others sitting on the other side. Some will use pictures of a poor human being in a dilapidated condition, saying this is my father, uncle etc to arrest the emotional feelings of his/her target.

Pictures may express moods but not the hidden feelings of a person or a thing. You might think the woman in the picture is smiling but you never know what she really feels. Pictures are not Gods creation. The real me created by God and a picture of me created by phone or digital camera are poles apart. They say if you want to see the real face of Bollywood actresses, visit them early in the morning. Photo-shoot after intense make-ups will surely produce wow! from you. But who knows your star actress might be uglier than your next neighbour girl. The most common phenomena of such earth-heaven difference picture are with the profile pictures of a beautiful and an exception group of women. I would rather use the term beautiful, because they are indeed beautiful in their profile pics. Edit after edit makes a woman a beautiful woman. Sometimes men who are unlucky with girls in real life resort to such tactics to gain attention from girls. There is a case where two opposite sex who knew each other on facebook met in real life. When they met they were full of surprises as the woman thought the man she is going to meet will be as handsome as Brad Pitt and the man had the same thought that this woman will be prettier than Hollywood actresses. Their meeting was the alpha and omega. Pictures can be deceptive and devoid of real entity.    

The thoughts and expression of a photographer or an artist may be misunderstood or misinterpreted by the viewers or the observers. It is likely that the conception/idea about a particular picture may be different between an artist and an observer. Also people cannot tell the character of a person simply by looking at the picture. Picture can portray the positive part of human personality by unrevealing the negative aspect of it. For example, a renowned singer is an alcoholic addict. The company who sponsor him/her portray him/her as a good Samaritan by asking him/her to act for a good cause (like handling out financial assistance to the victims of earthquake) for a photo shoot. Thus nobody even a single soul has any idea about his/her other side of a coin.