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Ritchin: “fluidity of the digital”
- I think that when Ritchin said “fluidity of the digital”, he refers to digital media’s nature of easy manipulation. The advent of digital technologies has largely increase our accessibilities to various materials and the convenience of re-organizing the digital content, such that we can easily re-shape any digital product basing on the original outcomes. Another aspect of the “fluidity of the digital” is the evolving of digital media, either in size, content and with time. Digital media permits keeping the contents in memory, which allows further manipulation and explanation on the content, and that makes the digital more “fluid”. In Ritchin’s case of O.J. Simpson, you can see how human manipulation has guided the directivity of digital image, and how its social impact has lasted to suggest its fluidity. Other examples can be find everywhere in today’s social media—how a post of a celebrity can be distorted and misused in the way that deviate the original meaning when the digital content was first produced.
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Photography’s capability of capturing reality
- The unique capability of photography to capture reality lies in the human culture of vision. Seeing takes up so big a part among all our ways to sensing the world that it becomes one of the very primary way for human to collect informations from the surrounding. And among all other arts and technologies, photography is the closest way to human vision that contains plenty of informations in the frame: images, lights, time and etc. All other text-based media or technology such as text and books has fallen short on their directness and efficiency of carrying multiple informations. And yet photography also has its limitations—it’s static and plain in 2d, and it can only capture a fragment of time or space. But the limitations actually allows more space of imagination, or even manipulation, that, while keeping photography’s capability of capturing reality, they also allows more editing and shaping upon the reality—comparing to videos and virtual reality.