WikiLeaks Point of View in Image Form

When the sirens of change are screaming will you be an activist or apathetic? When your world is threatened will you take up arms? When there is injustice, no matter how big the machine, will you fight "The Man"? When it's all too big to understand, will you retreat?

The images chosen here tell the story as I wrote about in "The American Way." In the top left corner we have the siren light overlapped by the universal signal for "shhh." We begin the story with the images expressing both the alarm of exposing national secrecy and the alarm of the secrets revealed.

We now have to ask ourselves how we respond to this alarm: run? fight? care? We see my estimation of what most Americans choose in this case as the next image in the story. Homer Simpson, who I would argue is America's Everyman, is asleep with drool coming out of his mouth. He doesn't care. Above him floats the both ironic and literal sign; "Danger: Internet."

On the next line of our story, we see some of the characters represented in "The American Way." These characters also represent perspectives on the WikiLeaks scandal. First we see the traditional American family, scared for their safety. They will "rage against the machine" and take up arms, as we see the young woman doing in the bottom left. Overlapping her are the images of our Vietnamese child who grew into an adult hoping the US would be held accountable for secret behaviors.

In the center of our characters lay the two most important elements of this conversation: technology and the scales of justice. In the context of WikiLeaks, we look around at our characters with their different and valid perspectives and ask: where does technology become our scales of justice and when do the scales of justice need to limit the scope of our technology?

We end our visual story with the final (and only) repeated image that is meant to be both a question and a statement: "Danger: Internet!"

Details about the creation of the image:

I used 4 programs to make this graphic.

I began with google image search and found the major points of my concept in images.

I saved these images and narrowed them down to the ones that resonated the most.

I opened GIMP and began stacking the images in layers. I kept arranging them in a way that moved around in the same shape as my thoughts on the topic.

I anchored the images and saved it as a jpg.

I then opened the jpg in GIMP and used the smudging, clone and burning tool to make the images blend. I also used the paint brush for some effects.

I then saved the image and opened it in word. I added text in word.

I then saved the image and used FastCapture to copy the whole image as you see above.