In the same vein as the fidelity war in audio where low fidelity won out of gluttony, immediacy and portability, the video world is experiencing the same battle and fidelity is the victim.
People want everything, now, and everywhere. They don't care about accuracy, realism, or full sensory experiences. The idea of blocking out all of life's little irritations and forgetting the troubles with friends, family, and work to obsess for two to three hours on one story line as an escape from life - that idea has been lost.
People go to movies to eat, drink, visit, and generally have a party. I haven't seen a packed Imax in years and the likes of the Alamo Draft House and the copycats now popping up all over the nation are a clear indication that story telling is dead, or dying.
So, 3D TV died because people didn't want to deal with the hassle of putting on glasses. Big screens are only interesting because they are a symbol of status and success. Few calibrate their TVs. Few will pay extra for all the high definition channels and those that do often forget that the SD channel they are watching has a HD channel on the same TV service. In fact, since nearly everyone has a HDTV at home, why do we even have SD channels on our cable and satellite services anymore? Why?
People want video on their portable devices. They will watch a few minutes of a movie or show whenever they get a chance, then try to pretend they've seen it and get all the subtext, nuance, character development, foreshadowing, and the other trapping of excellent writing in these shows or movies. But they don't get it. They just remember the basic plot points and how insane it was that Sally faked an orgasm in a diner. Our civilization is going backwards and careful attention to detail in the art of music, writing, stage, TV, Movies, and even sculpture and canvas art is lost on us. We are plebes who could care less about spending an extra 10 minutes looking at the beauty of a great painting because my Facebook notification caused my phone to vibrate once.
It is sad.
We are entering another intellectual dark age where only a handful of "crazy" scholars know anything about history, art, science, and society. Each of us only pays attention to the absolute fewest things we absolutely must know in order to keep the party going. I cannot be happy until I build that deck or upgrade my grill. I need to make some money to do that. Oh, and my friends all have fire pits, so I damn well better add that to my list of things I absolutely need but will never use after the newness wears off.
People want everything, now, and everywhere. They don't care about accuracy, realism, or full sensory experiences. The idea of blocking out all of life's little irritations and forgetting the troubles with friends, family, and work to obsess for two to three hours on one story line as an escape from life - that idea has been lost.
People go to movies to eat, drink, visit, and generally have a party. I haven't seen a packed Imax in years and the likes of the Alamo Draft House and the copycats now popping up all over the nation are a clear indication that story telling is dead, or dying.
So, 3D TV died because people didn't want to deal with the hassle of putting on glasses. Big screens are only interesting because they are a symbol of status and success. Few calibrate their TVs. Few will pay extra for all the high definition channels and those that do often forget that the SD channel they are watching has a HD channel on the same TV service. In fact, since nearly everyone has a HDTV at home, why do we even have SD channels on our cable and satellite services anymore? Why?
People want video on their portable devices. They will watch a few minutes of a movie or show whenever they get a chance, then try to pretend they've seen it and get all the subtext, nuance, character development, foreshadowing, and the other trapping of excellent writing in these shows or movies. But they don't get it. They just remember the basic plot points and how insane it was that Sally faked an orgasm in a diner. Our civilization is going backwards and careful attention to detail in the art of music, writing, stage, TV, Movies, and even sculpture and canvas art is lost on us. We are plebes who could care less about spending an extra 10 minutes looking at the beauty of a great painting because my Facebook notification caused my phone to vibrate once.
It is sad.
We are entering another intellectual dark age where only a handful of "crazy" scholars know anything about history, art, science, and society. Each of us only pays attention to the absolute fewest things we absolutely must know in order to keep the party going. I cannot be happy until I build that deck or upgrade my grill. I need to make some money to do that. Oh, and my friends all have fire pits, so I damn well better add that to my list of things I absolutely need but will never use after the newness wears off.
Well ok violence is pervasive and I'm not claiming to be immune from it, I just have certain ways I resist it personally, maybe not the most effective ways, who knows. And yes it's hard to really have an accurate perspective on thousands of years of history and whether things are better or worse now than at some other time, because we - and I mean 'we' in a very broad sense - as humans tend to be pretty short-sighted to what's within our own experience. But I do believe there's a trend toward violence in movies and other media, and towards the notion that it's ok to be violent as long as you're adhering to some noble principle. That's a notion I resist, even if I'm a hypocrite because I play borderlands. But that game makes no pretense whatsoever to be using violence towards some gallant truths, it's just a go-out-and-shoot-whatever-moves sort of thing, with humor rather than taking itself at all seriously, part of why I like the game so much, not because of the violence per se; that still in my mind makes it different from MOS or many other recent movies. Granted, maybe that distinction is only in my head.
