Ding, J.: Can data die? : why one of the Internet's oldest images lives on wirhout its subjects's consent (2021)
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- Abstract
- In 2021, sharing content is easier than ever. Our lingua franca is visual: memes, infographics, TikToks. Our references cross borders and platforms, shared and remixed a hundred different ways in minutes. Digital culture is collective by default and has us together all around the world. But as the internet reaches its "dirty 30s," what happens when pieces of digital culture that have been saved, screenshotted, and reposted for years need to retire? Let's dig into the story of one of these artifacts: The Lenna image. The Lenna image may be relatively unknown in pop culture today, but in the engineering world, it remains an icon. I first encountered the image in an undergrad class, then grad school, and then all over the sites and software I use every day as a tech worker like Github, OpenCV, Stack Overflow, and Quora. To understand where the image is today, you have to understand how it got here. So, I decided to scrape Google scholar, search, and reverse image search results to track down thousands of instances of the image across the internet (see more in the methods section).
Lena Forsén, the real human behind the Lenna image, was first published in Playboy in 1972. Soon after, USC engineers searching for a suitable test image for their image processing research sought inspiration from the magazine. They deemed Lenna the right fit and scanned the image into digital, RGB existence. From here, the story of the image follows the story of the internet. Lenna was one of the first inhabitants of ARPANet, the internet's predecessor, and then the world wide web. While the image's reach was limited to a few research papers in the '70s and '80s, in 1991, Lenna was featured on the cover of an engineering journal alongside another popular test image, Peppers. This caught the attention of Playboy, which threatened a copyright infringement lawsuit. Engineers who had grown attached to Lenna fought back. Ultimately, they prevailed, and as a Playboy VP reflected on the drama: "We decided we should exploit this because it is a phenomenon." The Playboy controversy canonized Lenna in engineering folklore and prompted an explosion of conversation about the image. Image hits on the internet rose to a peak number in 1995.