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Moving pictures

I came across this video a few days ago. It's of a baby trying to manipulate a magazine as one would an iPad. She appears baffled that the images on the page don't respond to the movement of her fingers, which her parent finds endearing.




The video is of course cute, but the person who posted it seems well aware of the larger point that his or her child is being hardwired to think of words and pictures as things that move. Will this young girl ever fully appreciate that words and pictures also exist as ink on a page? Does this even matter? I wonder whether, had I been a contemporary of Guttenberg, I would lament the lost art of the scribe's pen and parchment that the printing press rendered obsolete. And while I enjoy the peculiar ambience created by watching a silent film (I recently watched the 1932 German film Vampyr on Netflix), there is no arguing that "talking pictures" ushered in a superior film experience. Similarly, as a music obsessive, I welcome the convenience of downloadable digital music (the CD is so twentieth century, after all), but let's not pretend that with all this technological innovation we're not also losing something. The more digital the world becomes, the more we live online, what we lose is literally something tangible--the smell of a new book, the sight of a letter in the mailbox, and the scratch of the needle on vinyl. Listening to music on vinyl was a full sensory experience, an idea that the Stone Roses captured back in the dark ages of 1989 in their song She Bangs the Drums:

I can feel the earth begin to move
I hear my needle hit the groove
And spiral through another day

Comments

  1. PeterOctober 24, 2011 at 2:49 PM

    I was very recently given the chance to be part of a focus group (perqs of where I work), and I'm rather concerned about the combined sociological effects that ipods/tablets/smartphones represent. To an older generation, they represent convenience. Gone are the days of lugging around a discman (which was ironically larger than a walkman) or a bookbag full of books. Well and good.

    But to a younger generation, they represent a freedom from commitment. Gone are the days when you need to pick one CD, and listen to that the rest of the day. Gone are the days when you need to pick one book, and read that the rest of the day. You need only look at an adolescent (or even undergraduate. The lines are scarcely distinguishable anymore) to see proof of this. They can barely listen to a full song before hitting next. They can barely watch a full TV episode (to say nothing of a movie) before jumping on twitter or facebook.

    You think that undergrads have a hard time committing to a major now? Wait ten years.

    Alright, my hip is starting to give out from balancing atop this soap box. Someone help me climb down, please.

    ReplyDelete

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