For many citizens of the information society, there is no more coincidence between how they know the world and their sensitive experience. Images not respecting shapes and proportions, words making no sentences; more than powerful extension of human senses and skills, digital gadgets are often prosthesis to compensate for increasing inabilities. Educated by the old school and television (on any platform, TV it is!) and by the market, the most in new interactive systems interact basically with themselves. The medium is the message and on widespread Narcissism and consumerism many try to make from their online addiction a lucrative job. “Hyperconnectivity” enables sorts of electronic hive minds across the network of social media. But spending time and personal resources in virtual worlds that we do not control, we don't have an ESC key for our real lives.
Top2. Technology, Senses, And Feeling
On October 8, 2013, a gunman entered a crowded San Francisco commuter train and drew a .45-caliber pistol. He raised his weapon, put it down to wipe his nose, and then took aim at the passengers.
None of the passengers noticed because they were attending to something far more interesting than present reality. They were subsumed by their smartphones and by the network beyond. These were among the most connected commuters in all of history. On the other side of their little screens, passengers had access to much of the world’s media and many of the planet’s people. They were not especially connected to the moment or to one another. They were somewhere else.
Only when the gunman opened fire did anyone look up. By then, 20-year-old Justin Valdez was mortally wounded. (Hirshberg, 2014)
The video made with a phone by an average user is not intended to be watched also on a television set and so it is normally taken vertical, though this often means to leave a lot of “sky” upon the subject, half display occupied for example by the ceiling and more important information (a hand, an arm, other persons) missing on the left and on the right, or frenziedly searched with nervous and frequent movements that disturb the view. When everything could have been easily framed perfectly simply turning the device horizontal and still.
This is a typical situation of the time of “all connected”; not to connect, in our minds, the videos we take by ourselves using phones with the videos we watch from professional productions on huge TV screens, as if they were on totally different planets; not to connect the quality of the device (so emphasized in the advertisement, that in some case made us choose just that device) with the quality we go actually to get in our own shots.
On the small displays of phones most pictures seem to be good, but often it is enough to watch them on a tablet or laptop screen to realize that the pictures are much more moved or blurred than we thought. This is generally not so important, as they are things to be consumed in a short exchange with relatives and friends, or on social networks with virtual but not less domestic friends, and the fact of having a device capable of 4K videos does not make many of us think at all that our product could be of quality.
If then it happens that by chance we filmed something interesting for the news of a true TV, a car accident, a flood, a fire, and in the absence of other images the national broadcast corporation is to use just our footage, instead of leaving a black or at least opaque frame on the sides of the vertical shot on the TV screen, in order to make the scene well visible, often they fill all the horizontal big display of TVs with something on the sides like a magnified and blurred mirror of the original picture, so that it is hard to distinguish the images of the original flood taken in vertical format from the digital flood mirrored all around. Information is confused, communication is quite nothing, but probably they know that TV audience doesn't like empty spaces in screens and wants the TV display to be always filled with a colored, moving image.