- What does Ritchin mean with the “fluidity of the digital”? Give an example of digital imaging/digital photography that exemplifies this.
“Fluidity of the digital” comes from the author’s statement that “the fidelity of the mechanical age was being replaced by the fluidity of the digital”. Through comparison, we can find that in the early ages when the technology was not so advanced, the photo was what the scene or object really look like. Nothing was done to it, and nobody considered it modifiable. However, as the author said, starting from 1900 Persian Gulf War, where the limitation of the camera was to “erase wounds and death from the visual vocabulary”, we began to deliver our own ideas through photographs. So, here, the “fluidity of the digital” refers to the ideas and access people have towards photographs. To specify, everyone can easily edit the photos to make them in correspondence with their worldview, regardless of the originals’ original thoughts. After realizing that, somehow, I found that fluidity can also be found in our audience. When such kind of idea was gradually accepted by us, our way to appreciate those photographs changed as well, which helps to make some of them thrive in the medias today. We help perpetuate and feed those photos that we like.
Such kind of examples can be easily found in our digital lives. With such high-speed lifestyles today, people tend to seek fun from fragmented information. Utilizing this feature, many social accounts begin to edit photos to create so-called appealing gossip about celebrities or stars. And their tools can be the photoshop app, the desire to get more attention, a made-up story, an original photo (this always has nothing to do with the things they make up), and their simple click to publish. However, things aren’t all that bad. This truly provides us with many conveniences.
- Reflect on the extent to which photography is capable of capturing reality; and compare it to other media (technology) (e.g., text, video, virtual reality, books).
It depends. For example, if I am choosing photos for a documentary or a popular science book, I am inclined to select photos 100% true. And if I operate the accounts I mentioned above, I tend to choose some edited one no matter how far it is from the original one. It can fail to capture reality at all. Other medias can be the same to some degree. It is because our ideas matter a lot. In a book, author tends to tell stories that conform to his arguments to persuade us. After realizing that the author is trying to let more people share the same ideas, it is not surprising to tell that his story is fake. I agree that true stories can be more convincing. But the author can make the fake one sounds real with enough details and his superb writing skills, just like we use photoshop skills to make the photo more appealing. However, since one is about pictures and one is about the written word, they still have several differences. As the author pointed out, “illiteracy works so well for advertising”, some commercial photos require no education background to be understood. Unlikely, reading a book needs us to know some words and to be educated so that we can get the main argument.
I totally agree with it that “the discussion should question the nature of photography and its potential role in our evolving society”. Despite the fact that it is mixed with different uses and strong illustrated preconceptions, we are still very excited to announce that we’ve already gotten further into this new media. It now is not only writing with light, but also writing with our own opinions. And besides telling the truth, we are more willing to engage in a dialectic with human beings.