Christine Dooley's Post!

In The Picture Problem (2004), Gladwell inspects the promises made by imaging technology (e.g., clarification, truth, accuracy) and finds that pictures, regardless of their resolution, are limited in certainty. Often, the information this technology shows us is not "the whole picture." In the Second World War, the U.S. Air Force successfully bombed the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt using Norden's computer, Mark XV, but Mark XV did not successfully tell the involved advisers and officers that the Germans could easily continue manufacturing airplanes without the ball bearings. In this case, technology needed outside information to fulfill its promise of accuracy. As Physician David Dershaw demonstrates with a number of x-rays, the same limitations apply to mammography. A white blur could indicate deadly calcification, benign calcification, natural glandular tissues, or harmless (sometimes harmful) carcinoma. At most, a screening can indicate the existence of a lump, but outside information (e.g., gene-signature research) is required to interpret and identify the lump. The seek-and-destroy method (i.e., find the tumor early, eliminate the tumor early) that radiologists practice surely saves lives, but many of the eliminated tumors, even if they were cancerous, would not have conquered bodies. Therefore, mammography does not give us the useful information we thought it promised (that is, mammography does not identify cancer for us)--a human hand can offer just as much. Seemingly, pictures are most useful when they are not solely relied upon to produce the results. 

Gladwell's article reminded me of an episode of The X-Files that I recently watched (called "E.B.E"), where F.B.I. special agent Fox Mulder receives photographic evidence of a UFO in Georgia. Mulder, who is quite passionate about proving the existence of extraterrestrial biological entities, readily believes the picture is "the truth." Mulder is often called a "believer," and even has a poster of a UFO in his office that reads "I want to believe." His partner, Agent Scully, often called "the skeptic," needs substantial proof and deems the image "fake." She explains to Mulder that he trusts this "evidence" too readily and needs to interpret the photograph carefully. When he analyzes the picture with the bureau's computer, nothing irregular is detected. But when he looks with his own eyes, he detects inaccuracies: the reflection of the moon on a car window in the picture is misplaced. In this case, someone physically manipulated a photograph to mislead Mulder, but it still raises an important question. Should one readily believe the information pictures present us, like Mulder, or reject the information, like Scully? Should we be believers or skeptics? When Photoshop is a click away, what do pictures really promise us? Gladwell does not answer these questions, but he directs us towards being more careful consumers of imagery. Sometimes, all this takes is using our own eyes. As Gladwell's re-analysis of Colin Powell's "evidence" demonstrates, some images, even high-resolution satellite pictures, require trained experts to fully interpret them.