What Ritchin means with this “fluidity of digital” is that all the data and photos are all used flexibly. They are interconnected and they are not refined to be accessed from one simple media or platform. In other words, they are not exclusive to each other and they can be easily accessed by people. One example of digital photography that I can think of is the statue of liberty in New York. It is not only regarded as the formal symbol of US spirit, but also used in other platforms as symbol with informal meaning such as in musical, it was once served as a hint of US identity. This fluidity of used for this photo of the statue of liberty reminds me how powerful this image is, for it represents not one standard meaning, but multiple meaning as people with different backgrounds interpret it differently.
Photography, admittedly, can capture our reality quite effectively. Since life is continuously in motion if we look at this world in our eyes, the camera, thus the photo, serves as an important tool of pausing our life, capturing that single moment that we will never get to clearly see with our own eyes. And by the function of zooming in and out, it can manipulate with the sight to find more details that our eyes would not be able to notice. Also, because of our anatomized biological structure, our eyes could only have a sight that is fixed, within a certain rang, which prevents human from perceiving the world through a different frame and thus prevent human from finding more beauty in the world.
Yet there is an extent to which photography can do to capture reality. There are some situations where the color contrast is too strong or the exposure is too strong that the original image becomes blur; there are also times that the beauty only reside in the video format, the constant moving of a phenomenon with a high frame rate to make the movement smooth. And beside this reality, which is the concrete world that people can see almost everyday, there are people who are interested in that fantasy world, in those things that people cannot see, cannot save as photography. In this perspective, when people’s imagination takes over, the virtual reality starts to get better than the photography. Afterall, photography is used to record, but if there is a brand new world that people can enter and experience themselves, that world will be preferred, since curiosity is human’s instinct, it is only when curiosity is reduced, possessive thoughts appear that human will start to record those beautiful things that they have seen before, using, such as, photography.
Furthermore, books are also a great competitor for photography, for it allows the readers to create the image by themselves, and makes them enjoy in their own imagined world prompted by the words, while photography presents a picture to the reader directly, killing the space for imagination. Last, the words in the book can capture lots of, subtle, unseen inner struggle of people, while in photography, though you can see how their struggle is eventually manifested, you won’t know the reason of it, which reduces the drama and value of that photography. In this perspective, photography is only the tip of that iceberg, while the books and e-books serve as that vast space under the sea.