The Curse of the Photoshop Blessing: Pandora's .exe - Week Four

Photoshop has turned people into either a skeptic or a fool. Being a powerful and useful program, much digital imagery's legitimacy is questioned. There is a social responsibility that ought to come along with Photoshop, as it may be one of the most powerful tools for deception we have.
The social responsibility of Photoshop is multiplied with the ease of distribution over the Internet. Individuals have more of a personal responsibility about this as they have no repercussions; the anonymity of the Internet allows safety.
Official publications have to worry about fact-checking their information. For text, this could involve  research, knowledge or communicating with people. For pictures, it involves trusting sources or a very keen eye. For example:

This photo of George Bush shows him reading a child's book upside-down. Pretty stupid.

This photo shows him with the book right-side-up. However you feel about this man, and there's no bias coming from me, but for truth's sake it's likely that he's not so stupid that he can't tell the difference between correct and upside-down text. The top image is the logically Photoshopped one.

So what? Well, this is similar to libel, and what people don't seem to understand is that publishing something to the Internet, anywhere on the Internet, is still publishing something. If half the people who saw that photo believed it to be real, that's real damage to Bush's reputation.

It's a powerful tool, Photoshop. Seeing is believing. Or it was, before digital photo manipulation was a household activity. Now everything we see is absorbed with skepticism, and we can never recover that comfortable trust.