What does Ritchie mean with the “fluidity of the digital”? Give an example of digital imaging/digital photography that exemplifies this.
In the new edition In Our Own Image, professor Fred Ritchie brought up the idea of “fluidity of the digital”. “One could say that we were entering the ‘post-photographic age’ in the sense that the fidelity of the mechanical age was being replaced by the fluidity of the digital”. This means that our era witness the revolution of photography, that it is no longer “a medium that had been mythologized as quasi-objective and historically reliable was being restructured in the computer into pixels to make it considerably easier to manipulate and quickly transmit”, loosing its original property of authenticity and being subservient to manual re-creation while spread in a more efficient way. For example, the first and foremost event, that the wounds and death are erased on a photograph with the help of computer, and transmit fast, becoming a “fake fact”.
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)
Media to reflect reality differs on the extent according to media type. If the extent of reality is measured based on the 3 aspects: the vision(light, color, outline), the audio(sounds), and the feel(temperature, is it warm or cold? Wet or dry? Or the touch: rough or smooth? Hard or soft?), then we can put the media respectively in such a diagram based on their capabilities and limitations:
But of course, with deliberate manipulation, all media are not 100% reality recorder. Maybe it is not only the presenter’s duty but also the audience to take a step back and consider the authenticity of the information. Just as Ritchie brings out, “just as photography was being recognized for reaching its maturity, it was time for it to grow”- In a digital world today, the field of photography is no longer pure “stopping time”, but can be a narration, a form of “art”, not simple record but an express of idea.
The revolution has its downsides(loosing persuasion that what we see is now unnecessary ‘the truth”), but it also has a good side, for example to help us better understand a future situation, or to greater emphasize on subjective opinions as we enjoy playing with the reality on a digital basis.