media wars: analog vs. digital

Growing up, I don't think I really cared what the quality of my music was like, just that I could listen to my favorite Mariah Carey tape over and over and over on my Sony Walkman. I was such an 8-year old. The images on my computer when playing computer games were the best I'd ever seen, and photographs were only blurry if you moved the camera while taking the shot, not if you resized the image correctly on the computer. I would listen to records as a child, but they were really tedious to listen to because I didn't know how to work the record player. "Annie" on vinyl was pretty badass, though. Overall, I think that the change from analog to digital has made my life easier, but at a certain cost.

Digital images are something that I believe both are good and evil. When digital cameras first came out, my Dad bought our very first family digital camera. It weighed a ton and was pretty basic. It zoomed in and out very little, had a flash, and a tiny screen that took what seemed forever to load the images onto. It made our life pretty easy because now more pictures could be taken, and they were free to develop. A big problem with my family was taking rolls of pictures and then leaving them for months (if not years) to be developed. It was really easy to just dump the images onto your computer and then decide which ones to print out or delete. The problem I see with this now is that once your computer crashes, you lose your memory card, or you stop using one computer for another and don't transfer image files, those pictures are lost forever. There is no negative and not necessarily a print of the picture. Additionally, a lot of times picture sizes can get messed up and you end up with pixelated images because of problems associated with your computer. With a negative there is a greater chance of you having crisp pictures at whatever size you want to print them with. Also, it may be easier to get cool effects on your computer for your pictures, but you can't use a fish eye camera, a split view camera or a polariod camera and get a digital image for it. Basically, I think that digital images are really convenient if you provide the right backup for the images in the event of a hard drive crash, but in the end old school photographs will always be cooler than and image a computer generated.

I'm not a music elitist by any means, but I think that the sound quality of a record is much better than that of a cassette tape or CD. Its really easy to make a playlist on iTunes of all of your favorite songs, or to download the new cool song everyone's listening to, but its not the same as listening to an album all the way through. In today's world, its perfectly acceptable to only listen to or download one song by an artist. I think that ten years ago it was much more common to listen to a complete album at a time and really learn to appreciate all of the works of an artist, rather than the new hit on the radio. I really don't know the history of vinyl, but I know a lot of people who are really passionate about music and who have incredible vinyl collections. You can't burn a record, and you can't really fast forward or rewind all that easily, so I definitely can see how people have a better connection to their music when its on vinyl. In regards to being able to mix music on the computer, I think that its a great thing for people to be able to do. I really don't know much about recording music, but I think that it puts people at a creative advantage to be able to mix music in their home, rather than paying thousands of dollars to go to a recording studio. As far as the quality goes, I think that in this day and age its easy to get the same quality if you have the right recording equipment, and from there you can mix and record just as well as you would be able to at a studio... okay, maybe a little lesser quality, but to me its all the same.

I think that digitally enhanced things are kind of lame, but at times they can be pretty sweet. I'm an art history major, and a lot of times in class we look at future projects of architects' new buildings. Because of digital imaging, we get to see what the building will look like, which is a great thing for people to be able to see. At the same time, though, the pictures always look futuristic and almost kind of glittery because they were obviously done on a computer. A lot of movies are enhanced digitally which I think can be entertaining and innovative, but its also not real, which I think people should keep in mind when watching them.

I think that one of the major problems with digital media is that its very much so based on technology rather than what it was initially based on. Now a computer captures the images from a digital camera rather than actually setting up a camera to focus, flash and take the photograph. It can all be done with the click of a button. Movies are made with green screens and computers rather than with a video camera and a set. Musicians sample tracks and mix other musicians songs rather than creating the music by themselves. While all of the things I talked about are innovative, new, and most importantly, socially acceptable in the 21st century, I think that people need to realize that not everything can and should be created on the computer. Quality does go down on most of the aspects of media, but at the same time what they're creating isn't really being created by themselves; a computer is doing all the work for them.