How the digital camera transformed our concept of history
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Because for me, history was always linked to visual artifacts -- styles of painting, black and white, jerky films, then styles of film grain and saturation, and so on.
The kind of vivid, "real"-looking photography that comes with cell phones is a very recent thing that it's still all "recent memory" rather than "history".
How would I view events like WWI, or the Civil War, if we could watch them in 1080p? Would they feel "closer"? Will it have the effect of collapsing time? Would we "learn more" from history because we can identify more?
Or will the ubiquity of content make it irrelevant? Will it seem less like history and just more of an extended present that we bother to learn even less from because it just seems the same?
(Sure you could argue that we'll have 360° 30K video with megagamut, and that current photo/video will seem equally quaint, but I don't think that's true. Footage today seems qualitatively real in way that black and white from the 1940's wasn't. I believe there's a threshold of quality we passed that probably started first with digital camcorders, and finished with the advent of 1080p videocameras in cell phones.)
It really changes my impression of what the late 1800's were like - it makes me think that they were more like me and less like a stodgy caricature.
https://mymodernmet.com/smiling-19th-century-photograph/
I suspect that modern video will humanize us to posterity.
That is an interesting point I've never really thought of even though I've heard "history is written by the victors" so many times.
Given that it is unlikely that we will have complete access to audiovisual "360° 30K video with megagamut" and even if we did, we likely wouldn't have the ability to sift through all of it efficiently, I have a feeling that history wouldn't change much.
Machine learning (deep fakes et. al) is another arms race that might come in to play as well. If we extrapolate from today, I'd say it is likely that I'd probably yell "fake" or at least claim that the video lacks "context" even if I saw something in "360° 30K video with megagamut" video if it doesn't align with what I already believe in...
We can do this more efficiently than you might imagine. There are a lot of people; watching videos is a very parallelizable process.
I also (now) wonder will the ubiquity of high definition archival footage take us further away from the past or will it connect us to it much more through empathy as the fake archival footage has with me.
A 4k remaster of the first star wars still look worse than a modern movie shot on film with modern glass and cameras. Let alone early 1900s 35mm film.
For Star Wars there is a 4k version: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/