donger need food.

Revolution (#9)

It's interesting seeing how technology has revolutionized the way we live. The advent of digital has now made it possible for the masses to the enter into spaces that were once enjoyed by only a select few. And digital has this weird power to completely alter the value that was placed on those things that were once considered esoteric. 18 years ago (holy crap -- eighteen years ago?!?!?), I made a presentation of a research paper in my high school English class about this new thing called a "Compact Disc", and compared it to the current mediums of the time (magnetic cassette and vinyl). Little did I realize the true potential of moving away from analog technologies.

The CD instantly obsoleted all those $20,000 thread driven Rota Star Sapphires with marble platter counterweights, $5000 Nakamichi Dragon tape decks, $3000 Teac reel-to-reel decks, making high-quality audio available to the masses. The elitist part of me loved to romanticize those unattainable (and often quite beautiful - have you ever seen the stunning heat sinks on a Krell power amp?) hunks of steel, plastic and silicon, putting together a dream separates system in my head. But now, all you need is one of those gazillion-channel-THX-certified-DTS-DBX-Pro-Logic-II-III-AC3-DolbyDigital-all-in-one receivers and you're all set. Or just hook up speakers to a $100 sound card on your computer playing mp3s.

And its not only audio, but I see it in film, photography, music. I remember renting time at the Chula Vista library darkroom armed with a towel over my shoulder and a binder full of negatives, that pungent smell of stop bath filling the senses, and that red glow lending an air of mystery and wonderment to it all. Now, it's simply load the scanner with the film, press a button, and poof! Magic. Pictures on your PC. Images published on the web. 8x10 prints. All without the chemicals, the fixer. And even better -- photostreams. With a public commenting system. I've been playing with Flickr a bit and I'm quite impressed... Online archival of all my high-res images, and others can download the full size images. Coooooool. And...the edit operations are so intuitive! Batch operations! With visual feedback! Very cool. And they support non-exact-dates. I can tell these folks actually used their software. Time for me to migrate my photos there.

The advent of the digital medium definitely has its consequences -- dilution and laziness to name a few. Enablement for the masses really means that there's a lot of crap out there to sort through -- especially when any fool can fire through five thousand...FIVE THOUSAND! photos in a single memory card. I mean, come on...why would you need to? I guess if you're stuck somewhere out in Timbuktu a thousand miles away from the nearest Ritz camera? :) And with digital being so easy, you can get really lazy. I mean, I'm in bed with my laptop jamming to Patsy Cline's Just a Closer Walk With Thee and uploading photos into a photo album. Heheheh.

I wonder when we'll reach information overload.

posted by VirtualErn @ 9:29 AM

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