Blogging in Christ — Issue 25

No False Witness in Small Things

Every piece of writing carries a second text that most readers never see. Beneath each image sits a filename, a caption, a description written for the machine and for the man who cannot see the picture. The counsel of the age treats that second text as a lever: fill it with the words men search for, and the image will travel further. The lever works. That is precisely why it must be examined.

The command stands without a size threshold:

"You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor." (Exodus 20:16)

No exception is carved out for small testimony. No clause excuses the witness given where few will look. The command does not say, "You shall not lie in court," or, "You shall not lie when it matters." It says you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor, and the neighbor in this case is the man who reads the small text. He is the reader who cannot see the image and must take your word for what it shows. He is the searcher who trusts your description to tell him what he is looking at. He is the neighbor who has only your words to stand in place of his eyes.

That is the joint on which the whole matter turns. A caption is not decoration. An alternative text is not a technical field. Both are testimony. When a man cannot see, your description becomes his sight. When you write that a picture shows what it does not show, you have not optimized anything. You have borne false witness to a blind man about the very thing he asked you to describe.

Consider what the small text actually does. A photograph of a quiet room, captioned with words it has nothing to do with, tells the searcher that the room is something else. A diagram of one doctrine, labeled with the name of another because the other name is searched more often, tells the reader he has found what he has not found. Each of these is small. Each of them is a sentence no one will cross-examine. And each of them does exactly what false testimony has always done: it puts a man in possession of something untrue, and sends him on his way believing it.

Scripture names this plainly, and it names it in the language of measurement. "A false balance is an abomination to Yahweh, but accurate weights are his delight." (Proverbs 11:1) The balance is the merchant's small instrument, used a hundred times a day, and the rigging of it is not a lesser sin because the weights are light. So it is with the small text under an image. The description that is off by a little still misleads every reader who trusts it, and the reader who trusts it most is the one who cannot check it against the picture himself. The abomination is not measured by the size of the weight. It is measured by the falseness of the measure.

The same witness speaks of the tongue, and the tongue is the right image for this work, because the small text is a tongue. "So the tongue is also a little member, and boasts great things. See how a small fire can spread to a large forest!" (James 3:5) The caption is a little member of the piece. The filename is smaller still. But a small fire is not a small matter once it is loose in the forest. The writer who stuffs a description with words the image does not earn has lit a small fire and called it strategy, because no one standing beside him can see the smoke yet.

Here the excuse must be heard and answered, because it will be offered. The excuse says: no one is harmed. The reader who arrives by a misleading description will simply leave. The searcher who finds the wrong picture will look elsewhere. No court is convened, no verdict rendered, no neighbor ruined. But Scripture does not grade testimony by the damage the witness can see. "I tell you that every idle word that men speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment." (Matthew 12:36) Every idle word. The word written in a field no human eye reads is still a word spoken, and it is still given account for. The smallness of the text is not a defense. It is the very reason the command reaches it: because what is small is where a man is tempted to stop telling the truth.

Nor does the excuse survive the other direction. If the small text is too small to matter, then telling the truth in it costs nothing, and the refusal to tell the truth there reveals what the writer actually trusts. But the herald's trust runs the other way. The Word sent out does its own work, and the writer's part is to keep his hands clean in the small places where no one is watching, because the Lord watches the small places.

Therefore the practice is plain, and it can be kept without any instrument at all. Name the image for what it is. Write the caption as a true sentence about the picture above it, and nothing more. Write the alternative text as you would describe the image to a brother sitting beside you who cannot see it: what is in it, in the order a man would notice it, without adding what is not there and without borrowing words from a subject the image never touches. If the true description draws few searchers, let it draw few. The piece does not stand or fall by the traffic the small text summons. It stands by whether the words under the picture are true.

This is love of neighbor in its smallest form, and Scripture gives it the largest reason. "Therefore, putting away falsehood, speak truth each one with his neighbor, for we are members of one another." (Ephesians 4:25) Members of one another. The reader who cannot see the image is not a visitor to be captured. He is a member of the same body, and your description is the member's service to him. To lie to him in the small text is to lie to a member of your own body, and to do it where he is most helpless, because he cannot open his eyes and check your work. The honest caption is not search strategy. It is the hand telling the eye what it sees, truly, because the body depends on the telling.

The same law reaches the other small texts the writer keeps. The title that promises what the piece does not deliver is false testimony against the reader who trusted it. The summary that claims a conclusion the argument never reaches is false testimony against the man who acted on the summary alone. The tag that files a piece under a subject it never treats is false testimony against the seeker who opened it in good faith. Each is small. Each is a witness.

There is a final reason, and it is the reason beneath all the others. The herald serves a King who is Himself the truth. "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.'" (John 14:6) A herald of the Truth cannot bear false witness in small things and true witness in large ones, as though truth were a garment he puts on for the sermon and takes off for the metadata. The small text is still his word. The filename is still his word. The caption no one reads is still his word. And the Word he serves is not served by words that are not true.

So let the small things be true. Let the image be named for what it shows, and the caption say what the picture is, and the hidden description speak plainly to the man who cannot see. The herald has a different measure. His Yes is Yes in the headline and in the footnote, in the paragraph and in the filename, because the neighbor who reads the small text is still his neighbor, and the Lord who gave the command still hears every word, including the ones written where no one looks.