In all honesty...

I am a horrible hoax detector. I scored 3/10 on the first test, and showed slight improvement on the second one with 5/10. What these photos say about the world around us is that people with too much time on their hands love Photoshop. It also says that we'll believe it when we see it. People are very gullible! Like you really have to tell some folks "You can't believe everything you see on tv!" But it is way easier to debunk hearsay as myth when we haven't seen it ourselves. But when you have supposed "evidence" right in front of you, it's much harder to distinguish the truth from fiction.

The ones I could figure out were hoaxes were usually obvious: The Oprah Winfrey pic was a horrible fake! As was the shark and aircraft blend. I had to look closely at the Big lady/small lady pic to notice her shadow was too small and no part of it was cast on her friend who was right beside her. The WTC photo, the plane just looked very cut-and-paste. The lighting, the smoothness of that image versus the graininess of the tourist's image, the size and position of the plane - all looked out of place.

For us as storytellers - still finding it hard to think of myself as a storyteller or a writer - but for us, it means we have an audience who is more and more skeptical of the truth. We have to be detail oriented and not make any mistakes in our details in order to win the trust of our audience. They will break down each piece of our story looking for errors or omissions, anything to call our bluff and discredit us as unbelievable. So we have to craft everything well, settings that the reader can relate to or imagine, characters that would fit within the setting, dialogue that the reader could actually hear the characters speaking, elements that we could borrow from real life events perhaps. Similar to Nicole Helget's piece, "The Turtle Catcher." Whenever we blend a real story with fiction, because of the details we have from real life experience, it seems to become more believable than simple fiction alone.