The far more insidious manifestation of 'false memories':
"But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together. (We searched for them in Google Images and gave up after scanning 500 results.)"
That presence or absence on Google Images is sufficient to constitute proof. Which isn't to say Obama's secretly shaking hands in underground bunkers. I am, however, interacting more and more with people who seem to think that if they can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist.
Interesting item here is how apparently newspapers with fairly large circulation see absolutely no problem in taking the content from other people and their websites but go absolutely hysterical when someone so much as deeplinks to an article on theirs.
1) Hence the broader point that such 'verification' extends far beyond this picture, which I agree would be noteworthy;
2) The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around.
3) It ignores the broader social context in which Google is the funnel through which information exists. If the ministry of truth wants to rewrite history, they'll do so by manipulating what Google results are available. The entire point of the article is how history can be manipulated, and then succumbs to verification via a source that can, in fact, be manipulated. That is, imagine a picture was taken, and you're sitting here thinking, "I really thought those two met." If verification constitutes, "Is it on Google?" then the task of changing history is pretty easy.
"The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around."
I see what you're trying to say here, but you've picked a terrible example. The probability that these men would meet and there would not be cameras around is negligible. Non-zero, I concede, but in a Bayesian world absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, under the right circumstances. (The conventional phrasing is wrong, it ought to read "Absence of evidence is not 100% proof of absence", which scans much less well but is actually correct; the phrase is intrinsically Aristotelian.)
You're still missing the point. Google has censored results before, and future censoring would lead to the types of dystopic scenarios outlined in the beginning of the article. I'm not about to get into a debate about the relative probabilities of a picture existing or not. In part, because just-so stories abound on either side. But more fundamentally: it's not the point of the selection in my first post.
I think you're getting carried away with the part of the article where it says that they verified they'd never met by checking google.
The historical fact is that these two have never publicly met. They already were pretty certain they knew this, but checked google just to be absolutely sure. Doing an image search is a lot easier than doing a text search since there's an awful lot of articles which mention them both and it would be too hard to sort through the guff.
That doesn't mean you can fool people into thinking that something never happened just by removing all pictures of it from google image search. (Removing pictures would of course be a necessary but not sufficient step for anyone wanting to remove something from history.)
I think that the probability that these men would meet WITHOUT cameras around is much higher than the probability that they would meet WITH cameras around.
If Obama and Ahmedinajad decided to meet, it would certainly be something Obama wanted to keep out of the newspapers. I certainly think that it is within the power of the President of the United States to arrange a secret meeting.
Interesting. On a somewhat related note, the technique of film editing has been heavily influenced by early Russian artists; Lev Kuleshov discovered that audiences' perception of what occurred in identical segments of footage was heavily influenced by the context in which it was viewed.
Stalin later suppressed the output of these early filmmakers, objecting to the idea of formalism (but was happy to have his propaganda people indirectly employ the technique to political ends).
The book "The Commissar Vanishes" presents bunch of before-and-after photographs in which various of Stalin's associates and henchmen are removed from photos after they become persona non grata. Some examples:
The first photo above shows an eerie example: So many of the commissars have been removed from the official history, that Stalin is alone in the photo.
Four of the fake incidents were tainted by essential truths. Lieberman did rebuke President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Cheney did rebuke Sen. John Kerry for mentioning Cheney's lesbian daughter, though not until well after the vice presidential debate. Bush was in Crawford during Hurricane Katrina. And Republicans did distribute a Jeremiah Wright ad. These truths may have confused some of our subjects. But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together.
Actually this one has a genuine incident with which it might have been confused as well. There was a several-day controversy during the Presidential campaign about whether Obama would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad if he became President. It occupied a large slice of one of the Obama/McCain debates. Obama's position that he would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad "without preconditions" was controversial and widely debated. So one might easily misremember that controversy as a controversy about a real, rather than hypothetical, meeting.
(In fact the meeting that Obama promised he'd be willing to attend never occurred, but I'm not sure whether this was because Obama changed his mind or whether Ahmadinejad turned out not to have any desire to meet anyway.)
Old news. We've known for decades about how easy it is to implant false memories, and bad therapy has caused millions needless suffering by implanting really horrible false memories. Between the memories, and the fallout from false accusations, this ranks as one of the biggest disasters in psychology in the last hundred years.
"But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together. (We searched for them in Google Images and gave up after scanning 500 results.)"
That presence or absence on Google Images is sufficient to constitute proof. Which isn't to say Obama's secretly shaking hands in underground bunkers. I am, however, interacting more and more with people who seem to think that if they can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist.