How significant is the difference between analog and digital images? I can't even tell the difference in playback from a record and an mp3, and though the mechanism is completely different, an analog clock and a digital clock both just tell the time. The infinite range of values for the second hand doesn't make a difference when you need to know if you're late. Digital watches with milliseconds provide far more detail about the time than is generally useful. Similarly, in a digital image, if the resolution is high enough, our eyes will just interpret the square points as smooth curves.


Is the problem of falsifying evidence unique to digital images? It seems like the real problem is people telling lies, and people believing lies, which are not new phenomena, and can be facilitated by any medium if the liar is creative enough (or the people are gullible enough.) Sasquatch footage doesn't need to be digitally altered if you've got a big enough guy and a gorilla suit. If people were at all familiar with photoshop it should be obvious that digital photographs can easily be altered and distorted. It seems to go without saying that nearly every photograph that we see in everyday media is altered in someway, when an unaltered magazine cover stirs "controversy". You could choose to believe NASA photographs represent reality because you trust NASA as a scientific authority, which would be different than believing photos just because they are photos.