The Revolution Will Be Photoshopped

Palin, bikini, gun. Where I see a run-of-the-mill Photoshop hoax, and you see a hilarious prank, and that person over there sees a crass political smear, media scholar Henry Jenkins sees pure-D democracy in action.

The author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide says ordinary folks who engage in political-themed Photoshoppery are using the latest technologies to produce the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. As such, they provide us with an unmediated view of what's percolating in the popular consciousness.

So, what are we to make of the runaway popularity of VP candidate Sarah Palin's "hot pics" online?

"For the first time," Jenkins writes, "we have a vice-presidential candidate who is young, feminine, and well, as she is one of the first to acknowledge, 'hot.' . . . Needless to say, Palin's appearance and persona provokes strong reactions, ones which struggle to separate anxieties that she may be a Stepford Wife or a Barbie from a more generalized dismissal of attractive women."

Translation: Sarah Palin represents something new and anxiety-provoking on the political landscape -- a powerful woman who is also, as Jenkins puts it, a "babe." What's more, she's a babe who "knows how to shoot and skin her own meat" (and probably a better shot than Dick Cheney).

And we're sore afraid, hence our fascination with these images.

For more zeitgeist insights plucked from the Wild and Woolly Web, hop on over to "Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File."