Draft of Project 1

In this post I'll be assembling a draft of my controversy post mortem in the form of a Quick Reference Guide.

What is "Dressgate"?

In February of 2015, Scottish couple Grace and Kier Johnston were to be married- so naturally Grace's mother needed something to wear to the wedding. She and her husband Paul went shopping at a store called Roman Originals, where she snapped a photo of a blue and black dress made of lace and silk and sent it to her daughter for approval. Grace said that it was lovely- but also that it was gold and white. Cecilia (Grace's mother) also saw it as white and gold in the photo, even though the dress is actually blue and black- but disregarded this and bought it anyway, spent the £50 and wore it to the wedding.

A few days after the wedding, on February 26th, a friend of the couple who attended the wedding posted the picture of the dress on her Facebook and Tumblr (posts which have since been removed) asking what color everyone thought it was, because she and her friends couldn't agree. Later that same day, Buzzfeed posted their first article about the photo, which was when it really started to gain popularity and go viral. And as it turned out, nobody in the rest of the world could agree either. And thus, Dressgate was born.

Ruiz, Marco. "The Dress". 2/27/2015 via Flickr. Attribution -ShareAlike Generic 2.0

Confusion Ensued 

After this dress became a viral sensation, everyone with an internet connection started to try and figure out what color the dress was- blue and black or white and gold. Now, normally the opinions of celebrities aren't very important due to their likely lack of credentials in the matter, but seeing colors of the dress involves no credentials or experience, only a neurological and psychological differentiation that anyone can have. Since celebrities' tweets are very popular and easy to access, using their differences as a model is perfect because it's unrealistic to find every tweet related to #Dressgate. 

(can I insert screen caps of tweets here if they're not public domain photos? Are tweets public domain? I'll find out by my next draft/the polishing of this draft)

What About the Woman who Took the Photo?

Cecilia Bleasdale is the mother of Grace Johnston, who seems pretty pleased to have her fifteen minutes of fame in her interview with Ellen Degeneres, but she has made some statements to the contrary.  "We were completely left out from the story, we had no control...You saw all the companies using the blue and black and white and gold to sell their products and nobody wanted to miss out" said Cecilia in her interview with BBC news. In the same interview, her husband Paul said that "Basically they've taken our property and profited off it without even giving us a credit, a thank you, nothing."

In theory these claims are valid. Cecilia and her husband took the photo, it belongs to them and they should be given credit. However, these claims are based in emotion. They never would have cared if the photo hadn't gone viral. And they did not take any action to secure a copyright to the photo, so it will be hard to do anything about it after the fact. It's hard to not agree with them, they do have a point in that they should own the photo. But the fact is, they did nothing to secure a copyright in time. The same source I've linked above says that they are considering legal action.  

More Importantly- Why do we see Different Colors?

Hendrick, Matt. "The Dress". 3/2/2015 via Flickr. Attribution- NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

Scientists have done their best to explain why different people see different colors in the dress. Different scientists have different opinions as to why some people see blue and black and others see white and gold. In an article from Mashable, their "scientists" say that the dress looks white and gold because it's overexposed, and that "simple Photoshop techniques to correct overexposure will show you what the dress looked like in the first place." However, this is obviously wrong because I, who saw the dress as white and gold, still see it as white and gold after they've "fixed" the problem in photoshop. 

Now the author of another scientific article is Ian Sampling, science editor of the Guardian online news. Ian interviewed Bevil Conway, researcher at MIT, and he found something quite interesting. "Women and older people were more likely to see the dress as white and gold. The same group are more likely to be larks, being awake in sunlight hours, rather than owls, who were awake more at night time" said Conway in the interview. In this same interview, he argues that our brains either discount the blue or white chromatic bias in the photo, and people who are exposed to more natural daytime light are more used to discounting blue bias, and therefore see the dress as white and gold. Conversely, people who stay up late and are used to darker light have more experience discounting the lighter side of chromatic bias and see the dress as blue and black. 

The third and final scientific opinion that seems to exist is that your brain discounts the chromatic bias automatically, regardless of the kind of light you're exposed to the most. Adam Rogers interviews Jay Neitz, neuroscientist at the University of Washington. He says that "I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen...Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance." However this same article contains the words of Bevil Conway, who again says that "What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis...So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."

Do We Have a Conclusion?

The answer is yes and no. There's a general scientific consensus as to why some people see different  colors than others, but there will never be a way for people to see both. People who see white and gold will never be able to understand how people see black and blue and vice versa. This is as close as we will come to an answer on the dress that changed the internet.

NOTE TO PEER EDITORS

There are a few things I'd like you to remember- 

1. I haven't stylized this very much as it's a first draft. I would like to make use of colors and fonts in my headings as I polish it further.

2. I will either at screenshots of celebrity tweets or quote and cite them. Either way, their words will be here. 

3. I am most likely going to add more photos and infographics. The majority of what is here is just my raw information.