One image two or more views.

There’s a Hebrew expression that loosely translates as “on taste and smell you can’t argue”. Essentially what this means is that if two people are arguing about a preference, how can one convince the other that there is a ‘’better” preference, they are preferences, which is why one person chooses one over the other. What people may be arguing over is whether one should try the other’s preference and see what all the rage is about.

On preferences one cannot argue, and the same may apply to seeing something and interpreting the action in your own personal way. We live in a time where images and videos are the norm for being able to see an event taking place. Two people may see the same video or image, and two people can have entirely different reactions.

Context of these mediums ought to be on the mind of the viewer. Regardless of the conclusion the viewer has made, or what kind of reaction is elicited by the image; it ought to derive from asking oneself context. To make this clear, every negative situation that escalates has a starting point, where the situation hasn’t yet escalated; i.e. the time when people aren’t filming or capturing the images. Then situation escalates to the point where bystander tells themselves that it would be a good idea to film said situation (positively escalated situations often are predicted, or you know a good thing is coming, so filming may start earlier. Negative situations like a street fight may only start getting filmed after the bystander determines the “filmability”. If the filming captures the whole event, then the bystander may have been tipped off as to an event about to take place, which also puts into context the captured imagery i.e. people knew they were going to try and escalate an event for some reason…)

While I am generalizing about all filmed situations, I find, purely anecdotally, that context of the imagery helps me not get swayed one way or another about the credibility of a situation, so as not to jump to any false conclusions. The film may be accurate, but general analysis and thoughtfulness requires that I ought to ask myself the context of the imagery being showed. Sometimes it is obvious what the conclusion ought to be, other times, it makes sense for a court of law to make a judgement that provides evidence and context. We have laws to protect people from being falsely (albeit sometimes people do get falsely accused of crimes they are innocent of- sometimes this is due to context failure) accused- us not in the legal system, (i.e. the court of public opinion) ought to ask ourselves what the context of an image is before we jump to conclusions. Once we ask that question and we come to whatever conclusion we come to, we ought to let people know that “I saw this image, and this is my conclusion…” rather than “this image must mean that…”- context.