The cybersphere is abuzz following the news that BP Photoshopped (note to my spellchecker: it’s a legitimate word!) a photo of their Houston command center, which appeared on the company’s official crisis response website. In the original photo a few of the video wall screens were blank. BP filled the blank screens with ‘live’ images from the hemorrhaging well.
To add insult to injury, the doctoring job was so sloppy, that anyone could easily see the telltale artifacts:
And wait, that’s not all – the photo is from 1991 (as apparent from the image metadata tag, which the geniuses at BP forgot to edit), but was presented as a current image.
I can’t help but imagine the decision-making process: someone in media relations calls the web department, asking them to post an image of the command center, to show BP’s dedication, bla bla bla. The webmaster calls the Houston command center for a photo, and they send one from 1991 with blank screens, and that’s the only one they have, and they’re too busy to shoot another, because they’re dealing with the oil spill, so please don’t call us again. The webmaster sends the photo to media relations, they don’t like it, so they decide to fix it, but they have to do it ‘quietly’, so one of the guys says no problem, I’ve got Photoshop, let me fix it. And the rest is history.
Actually, I made up that scenario as an easy segue to what I really want to write about–let’s call it the Photoshop imperative.
I can still remember the pre-computer era, when advanced office skills consisted of typing with all ten fingers (on an IBM ball typewriter) and operating a Rolodex. Managers, needless to say, were exempt from learning these skills; that’s what secretaries were for.
Fast forward to the present. Would you hire a candidate for an office job who can’t type well, or doesn’t know how to surf the web?
Where we set the baseline skill set for administrative employees defines the weakest link in the company. That employee would be limited to operations that require the tools he or she already possesses, since most companies do not offer real computer literacy education.
Simply knowing a software, for instance, Photoshop, gives employees exposure to the activities of other departments in the company and other activities that are often beyond their official job description, which in turn gives them a broader insight about how the company works and the industry it works in.
So is it unreasonable to expect that an office employee, at any level, would have mastery of Excel (and not just for tabulating information, but actually making calculations) and the entire basic Office suite? How about Photoshop or InDesign? HTML editing?
We can only speculate what the minimum toolbox expected from high school graduates will be in the very near future. The ability to type, design and publish an e-book. Create a compelling presentation, with audio narration and 3-D animation. Edit video. Build a website from scratch. Build an iPhone app.
Because operating a pen just won’t cut it.
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