Seeking image which illustrates the point, you need the full picture before deciding.

June 8, 2009 7:16 AM

Can you help me to find an image or series of images which when revealed section by section or one by one suggest different things about a single situation? Like the old UK show Catchphrase I need an image which is initially covered and split into say 4 or 6 pieces. Each section is revealed bit by bit. Each reveal throws some new light on the situtation. It is not until the final section is revealed that the whole thing makes sense.

I hope the question has made sense. It is for a powerpoint presentation. I just need a single image, nothing offensive, or too grave either thanks. Perhaps it will be a series of images of the same thing each giving more information that the last.

Basically the point I am trying to illustrate is you need to have the full picture before making a decision. Part of the picture is no use!

Thanks in advance. Not sure about the category put it into computers and internet!

posted by therubettes to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Could you get away with showing this? A bit (BUT NOT too) risque, and REALLY gets the point across.
posted by dirtdirt at 7:26 AM on June 8

Thanks dirtdirt, i thought of that too, its a classic but unfortunately not appropriate for the audience.
posted by therubettes at 8:36 AM on June 8

There's this picture that you could play with. Rotate it 180 degrees, and go up (down?) to about the guy's knees. It looks like a skater skating on the ice. Then you can move down a bit more, and it looks a bit suggestive (and perhaps too suggestive for your audience), the whole picture reveals that it was being viewed upside down and rather than an interesting skating stunt, it's a skating crash.

Doing an image search on "fail", or "epic fail" might yield other ones more suitable for you. For example there's this one* with a goldfish and a cat. One view could just be the goldfish. The second view could be the cat reaching out, the third view could be the goldfish with something in its mouth (is that a worm??), and the final view could show the goldfish attacking the cat.

*sorry for the deep link, I didn't have time to sort through the whole icanhascheeseburger site for the main page for this pic./

posted by forforf at 9:30 AM on June 8

Basically the point I am trying to illustrate is you need to have the full picture before making a decision.

I don't have an image to offer.

But wanted to suggest that if you can't find an image, maybe you could fall back on the fable of The Blind Men and the Elephant?

From this page:

How they argued! Each one insisted that he alone was correct. Of course, there was no conclusion for not one had thoroughly examined the whole elephant. How can anyone describe the whole until he has learned the total of the parts.

And there is an image at the top that shows the different aspects of the elephant.
posted by marsha56 at 9:47 AM on June 8

Not a picture, but a video. Try this. I've used it myself in very similar situations. Points Of View
posted by JtJ at 10:13 AM on June 8

Great so far guys, I appreciate the clips but sound will not be an option for this particular presentation or so I believe.
posted by therubettes at 10:21 AM on June 8

This reminded me of David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College 2005 commencement speech.

I think you could illustrate the SUV parable (the Hummer) using just Creative Commons images from Flickr.

That parable has helped me so many times!

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
posted by foooooogasm at 10:26 AM on June 8