English captions tell you what you are seeing (from an English speaker’s perspective)

 

Images come attached to captions – this reinforces the notion that websites are all about knowledge production; with wish fulfillment and needs satisfaction as driving forces.  What happens in the case of deliberate satire?  www.theonion.com is an example of images deliberately skewed and attached to incorrect captions.  But, who decides how to define a photo?  Who decides which photos illustrate a certain event?  Most captions are in English – are the English-speaking people in the photos unconsciously privileged?

 

 

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© susan smith nash, 2002