There is a great deal unsaid, deliberately, in this piece of writing but you don’t have to be a textual archeologist to unravel what is ‘hidden’. There are times when indirect means are more effective at reaching the ‘truth’ than direct means, as we intuitively know through the use of metaphor.

 ‘Reality is the illusion created by the absence of alcohol’ – slogan on a T-shirt one of my students wore 40 years ago. I am tempted to replace it with this slogan: Reality is (often) the illusion created by the force of editing. 

You can create an entirely new ‘organic’ piece of text (words, phrases, sentences), sounds (spoken, sung), images (pixels, parts) or anything else by piecing together from multiple sources and different times which comes across completely different from the sources, just as ‘new’ colours can be created by mixing and matching different source colours.

This enormous power is literally in the hands of every user of PC and smartphones or tablets, with individual skill being the only decisive factor since the technology is available to anyone. Anything written, spoken, recorded, any image is vulnerable to the power of editing, ever since editing became an independent function and editing or snipping tools became available on every computer. The key difference between earlier times and now is that technology (via social media) also provides immediate and easy circulation, a fact of gigantic importrance.

This process inherently means deliberately leaving out any piece or pieces that does not suit the desired narrative. This is what the American mainstream media is doing with former President Donald Trump’s incoherent utterances, trying to santise them to ‘create’ coherence – https://newrepublic.com/article/185530/media-criticism-trump-sanewashing-problem.

Editing and films

Films are the perfect example of this because, as it is said, a film is ‘made’ at the editing table. During the era of celluloid films, scenes are ‘cut’ at specific points or angles to create the shot the director wants, with the result that a lot of meaning is ‘read’ into the deleted scenes.   

One of the most brilliant examples of how you can reconstruct an entirely different narrative from a given source is the 1997 film ‘Mad City’ directed by Costa Gavres and starring John Travolta (playing the role of a security guard at a museum holding a bunch of children hostage), Dustin Hoffman (playing the role of a TV journalist intent on finding out what really happened) and Alan Alda (playing a powerful anchor keen to fashion a ‘story’ that will make him famous). Overriding objections, Alda creates a narrative that has nothing to do what was really happening by carefully editing what John Travolta said at multiple times during the hostage to make him ‘say’ something entirely different from what he was saying. And, as expected, it ends in a disaster for Travolta, as the narrative fashioned by Alda forces the SWAT team to enter the museum to overpower Travolta.

In ‘The rising sun’, made in 1993, a video technician demonstrates how you can electronically ‘behead’ two people and interchange their heads to create two morphed individuals. In the film, the intent was to camouflage the fact that a Senator had committed murder.

In the 2007 ‘Die Hard 4’, a set of computer codes generate and distribute images of the White House imploding and collapsing as a pile of rubble and dust followed by a message that warns how this can become real. Using another set of computer codes, the villains hack into radio frequencies used by the FBI to send out false live audio messages. The computer codes here not only created falsehood but distributed it across multiple channels to create panic, underlining the basic truth that circulation is critical to create impact.     

There are many more films that will ‘tell’ us the same thing.

Synthesize

Hence, used well, synthesis is a great weapon, for good or bad.

The easy availability of electricity in the 20th century helped create electronic musical instruments such as the synthesizer which use analog or digital processing to generate sounds which start as simple audio signals known as waveforms generated by oscillators. They “can be sculpted, filtered and augmented in various ways to produce an extremely wide range of complex sounds” (https://www.soundgym.co/blog/item?id=what-is-a-synthesizer). What is educative for modern readers is that “in the early days of synths, they were often used to try to emulate (or synthesize) the sound of traditional acoustic instruments. While they can still be used to do this, synths are much more common these days to create sounds that couldn’t have been dreamed of in the pre-electronic era” (URL as above). I want to emphasize the point that the synth can create any ‘new’ sound not drawn from any source (an actual instrument).

Think of collages as synthesis. Collages can be created manually by piecing together multiple paper images but editing technology has rendered it so easy that even any uninitiated individual too can do. You can remove, change, modify, in anyway. And, if you don’t have anything specific in mind, you can experiment to see what emerges. Just explore the section on ‘Creativity & Design’ in Adobe’s site (https://www.adobe.com/in/express/create/photo-collage). How many photos must have been ‘touched’ by Photoshop!

Omission is as important as is inclusion in any process of synthesis and the ‘same source’ will produce completely different outputs in the hands of two or more individuals. This is particularly evident in a large text or celluloid films, deleting entire paragraphs or scenes, piecing together words and phrases and scenes, shifting paragraphs or scenes to create a ‘new’ story. Journalism encounters this every day, as even a seemingly simple news story can be considerably different, as can be seen when you compare news coverage in many newspapers. In journalistic parlance, this is called ‘editorial slant’!

The writing of ‘history’ is an excellent example of how the ‘same event or phenomenon’ can be construed in more than one way depending on the historian’s leanings. What is important or irrelevant can be the subject of an intense and even acrimonious debate. Revisions of historical accounts is inevitable as the writing of history is deeply affected by restricting or allowing access to resources.

So what?

You may ask. Everything. We must be on guard rather than be taken in by powerful but false texts, images, sounds or whatever. Technological democracy ushered in by the era of personal computers and accelerated by the advent of smartphones has placed editing techniques in the hands of every user of PCs or smartphones with the rise of social media facilitating instant and (defined) wide circulation.

It is just editing!