Friday, October 3, 2008

Day 12

When I was a kid there were still a lot of reruns on television that were in black and white, and of course there were old pictures in my parent's photo albums that were in black and white (in fact, one of my earliest baby pictures is black and white). So I knew quite early that old stuff didn't have color. At the same time, I was aware that some tv's weren't color, so that regardless of the film used, color or black and white, that set would only show it in monochrome. The reason I'm bringing this up is because, for whatever reason, I believed in my earliest years that the world itself had no color until the 60's.

Most of you reading this must be thinking, this guy was a real dolt as a kid. In my defense this thought was to my best recollection, around four years of age. I know it was before kindergarten. But I can remember wondering what it must have been like for my grandparents to live in a black and white world, a world whose sky and grass and houses were only varying shades of gray. And then one day, someone (I'm not sure who) came along and painted all of it, and I thought, what a wonderful time to experience: the day the world became color. When I told my mom this, she said very bluntly that it was just the film that had changed. The world has always been the same.

Looking back on this memory, though, I think my four year old mind was on to something. Now I wonder what it must have been like to live in a fully colored world, but all visual documentation of that world, both real and fictional, was black and white. I think it's why we now associate black and white film stock has having some artistic quality. Because it's not an exact representation of the world, but something more ethereal. I'm sure when they came out with color film, people found it sad in some sense, because it was a little too real. I feel, in some ways, the same about HD television. Why do I need to see the beads of sweat on that politician's upper lip? Why do I need to see the plastic surgery scars on that actress? But, because I'm a person who accepts that changing technology now moves faster than weather patterns, it's no big deal one way or the other. Most of what I watch now is not HD. In ten years (or five, or two), everything will be HD, not because I choose it, but because that will be the only choice.

In the end, it's all about how our ability to recreate and communicate our perceptions shapes our understanding of the world. It's why the ancient hunters who painted on the walls of Lascaux in France ritually shot arrows at the images before going out after the real thing. No one would do that now because it seems absurd, but people do use Google Earth to make sure they understand the exact location of Disneyland before driving there. Because we trust that it's as close to reality as we can get.

The rub comes in knowing if the technology shapes our understanding of reality or if we create technology to mirror what we already understand about reality. Did I think the world before the 1960's was black and white because the technology shaped that perception, or did I already begin to understand that a new, metaphorical, color had come into the world about the same time that it arrived on film.

I think the dilemma we're faced with now, is that technology moves faster than we can understand how it's affecting us. Look at something so mundane as movies: for the first third of my life, you could go to the theater and maybe if you were lucky, catch it in some revised version on television. Then came VHS rentals and purchases in the middle third of my life. Then suddenly, we've gone from VHS, to DVD, to Blu-Ray; from renting at a store, to renting from Netflix, to renting through I-tunes, to watching it online through streaming video, as well as being able to purchase it in any of those formats. Then there's the delivery: before you could watch it in a theater or at home on a tv. Now I can watch a movie anywhere on any number of devices, which will then be obsolete in five years or less. When I was a kid, I could only rely on people's descriptions and memories of films they had seen in the past. Now, when I tell my kids about something I watched when I was their age, they say, "Check YouTube, Dad. I want to see it."

In the same vein, as technologies become obsolete, we tend to ignore those past archives unless they're updated to a new media. I have a box of photos that were taken before 2003 that are never looked at. After 2003, we bought a digital camera and have taken literally thousands of pictures that we peruse at least several times a month. Does that make the events in our life prior to digital photography less improtant? Do the photographs taken on actual film and stored away in boxes seem more artistic or sacred?

I've seen students pass on research for papers, even if it's perfect for what they're writing about, because it's not available online in full-text. They just find something else that is available. And who's to blame them. When I was in college, I avoided microfiche like the plague and interlibrary loan was such a pain in the ass. Once, I helped my brother-in-law, Jon, write a paper using only the books we happened to have in the house. He got an A.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make with all this. I love technology. I think Ctesibius building water clocks in ancient Alexandria is just as amazing as being able to watch live footage from Mars on my cell phone because it's humankind taking another tiny step toward the understanding of truth. But it seems that by letting technology decide for us which things will be remembered and studied, we're walking a dangerous path toward a dark age of our own creation. We consider ourselves the most informed generation in the history of humankind, which is true, if that information shows up on the first two pages of a Google search. Any knowledge past that is reserved for elite specialists. And if it's only available on microfiche, it's forever lost, the same as the scrolls containing the wisdom of the ancient world when the library at Alexandria burned to the ground.