It’s a sad day when a beloved piece of technology dies. Sometimes it happens suddenly. Despite your best efforts to take care of it and keep it alive as long as possible, these things happen. You can wake up one day and it’s gone. The hard drive is corrupt. Your DVD player just got too old and it was its time to go. It’s ok, though. You’ll get a BluRay to replace it and the hurt will eventually go away.
I loved my 160GB iPod Classic. It was silver with a black and yellow stripe down its back that I taped on there. I treated it rough, but took good care of it. One slip was all it took to send it to the ground. It was the first and last fall that it would ever take, but it was enough to start it on a long decline towards its imminent doom. First, it started skipping. 15-30 seconds of the start of each song was all you got, but only up to the “K”s. Everything else worked. So you take it in to iTunes to restore its settings, thinking it will be a routine operation, but that’s when you find out that it’s much worse than you thought. It starts slipping away before your eyes. Songs don’t want to be loaded back on to the hard drive. CLEAR! Restore again! We’re not getting anywhere. It’s struggling to get 200 songs on the HD and then it freezes. CLEAR! It won’t even mount now. The computer has turned its back on your old friend Chet and won’t even talk to him anymore. I don’t think there’s anything else we can do for him… There must be some mistake. He was just right there.
Stay with me. I’m getting to a point.
Filled with a sense of adventure and grief, I went to the local Best Buy shelter since they were having (not-much-of) a sale on Nanos and I thought it would help me get back in the game. Working out isn’t the same when you don’t have a friend there motivating you. So I did it. I bought a little yellow nano and brought it home to meet my computer. Turns out, they are NOT compatible. My computer is getting a little older and slowing down. But I put the two in the playpen together, and right off the bat, the computer is letting me know, “Huh uh… you’re not putting this young whippersnapper in here with me. Your iTunes shots are out of date!” They didn’t let me know this at the store. So I try to update my iTunes, but no! I would have to update my OS first! This is a problem I’ve run into several times before. Since I have some… less-than-legal software on my computer, I can’t update my OS or else it will cause me to reset the software, but since it runs ok, I don’t worry about it. Either way, turns out that I would need to buy a completely new computer in order to get my nano to work. So I took it back.
That’s the point I’m coming to (and sorry it took me so long to get there… I really loved that damn iPod). Although we all know that technology will eventually become obsolete, the idea of technology will never really die. Something will always be there to replace what we have when one thing breaks. This is comforting, but it also comes with the negative aspect that everything we own, no matter how awesome it is now, will eventually suck. If you look at the infinite futuristic timeline of technology, then you’ll see that the next generation iPod nano to come out (the 8) already sucks, because it won’t be as good as the 9, which is farther in the future, but is just as obsolete as the next. “First world problems.” No wonder kids in America are so depressed. They’re surrounded by $5000 worth of electronics which suck and they’re busy (not) working jobs that they hate so that they can save up enough money for the next POS to grace their shelves.
So why is this being posted on a film website? Because the same thing is happening in digital filmmaking. While digital has helped revolutionize the way that we make and watch films, the undercurrent of the industry is no longer focused on the craft, but is constantly focused on the technology. What camera was Citizen Kane shot on? Who knows. What film stock? It doesn’t matter. The people that needed to know that information were the ones that shot the movie, and that’s all that it needed to be. Do you need to know how many RPMs the potter’s wheel was when the artist crafted that pot in the corner? What exact colors were used to paint Washington Crossing the Delaware?
If you look now at an Andy Warhol painting, people don’t talk about how perfectly the Campbell’s Soup can is replicated, and you might not even realize or care that it was created using screenprinting techniques rather than traditional painting, but the point is that the method isn’t relevant to the conversation. Sure. They’re nice replicas of the real thing, and there’s a base knowledge of art, but the meaning isn’t derived through the technology. Still, while Warhol’s ideas about art and culture were revolutionary, think about what the art world would be like if every artist replicated his work and worked with the same techniques that he did. Now imagine if every film used 3D. Or 48 fps. While there is a place for it (I will admit), without the variety of classical techniques, portraits, landscapes… everything becomes monotone. When studios stop making the decisions that are the best for each individual film, they’re monopolizing the industry into conformity based on what they think will make the most money, even if that’s not what film needs to have happen to continue evolving as an art. (As another example, look at a film like La Jetee. You don’t talk about it in terms of frames per second. If anything, it’s seconds per frame, but what you can talk about is the way that it is able to create emotion and character through still images; and the cultural impact that this short film has had on time travel science fiction is immeasurable.)
The 3D you watch now will pale in comparison to that of the future. The 4K cameras and projectors will look like crap when you can watch a pure 400K image projected straight onto the moon from your roof every night.
Film was never supposed to be about this. On one side, it’s cool. I will admit. One of my big regrets if there were to be the apocalypse tomorrow would be that we wouldn’t get to see the full potential of technology. It’s incredible what we’ve done in the past century, and it’s impossible to think that such huge leaps could be made again at any other point in the future, but I’d love to see it happen. But film, if it’s to be taken seriously as an art can’t get caught up in this space race that the modern daily consumer has gotten involved in. A camera is just a paint brush. Which type, it doesn’t matter, as long as you know the proper technique.
Interesting take on technology, Paul, and I like the points you make. I guess everything becomes obsolete, especially technology, so we should pay more attention to the substance of what it’s giving us, as opposed to the machine we’re getting it from? Maybe?
So what did you do with the iPod? How’d you solve everything?
The thing that really pisses me off about it is the planned obsolescence. Shouldn’t a company be proud that they can create a product that will be relevant for more than 4 years?
But regarding movies, it’s moving even faster than that. Every 6 months there’s something new which blows everyone’s mind and is all of a sudden the only thing that movies can be shot on, yet there’s still analog equipment from the 70s and 80s which holds its value and still sounds great. With the exponential gains in technological advancement, things come and go even faster. I mean, even if you look at the content: They announced the Batman reboot before the last trilogy was even finished! For some reason, everyone finds it necessary to have new things ALL the FREAKING TIME! Or at least it’s the media’s job to make us think that we do.
Anyways, I took the iPod back. Then, coincidentally, later that night one of my friends came over and said that he had an old broken one sitting in his car. It still worked, but the screen was cracked. So he gave it to me.
Hey Paul,
First of all, I forgot to say sorry your iPod broke. That should have been implied, since it’s a bummer. I liked your iPod, too.
I actually still have my iPod from about 7 or 8 years ago. Angela’s using it now, but you’re right that it’s sad that such a short period of time can be considered “long” for anything, really. Well, anything like electronics or entertainment. I suppose an 8-year dental surgery procedure could legitimately be considered “long.”
I’m glad it worked out in terms of iPods, but we’ll just have to see if your culture can stop grasping for the next, newest shiny things that come out.
Can’t wait till they’re projecting movies on the moon.
Love the thought of a camera as paintbrush.
I’m way behind the curve on ipods; just got a used 8gb one recently. Was using a Sandisk 1gb media player for the longest time. I’d put it on random and it would play the songs in the same order every time (almost became poignant).
Technology is overrated. I had to dust off my old, virus infested laptop just to rip some cds; my new computer is now incapable of retrieving metadata. Maybe people don’t do that anymore.
Me…Ta..Da…Ta…? Haha. It’s the same with my car. It’s completely falling apart (at least the windows are slowly ripping apart since they’re plastic) but I’m afraid to get something newer because at least with this one I know I can fix/change everything myself. There’s the starter. There’s the oil filter. It’s nice when you can talk directly to something you use everyday rather than having some crappy computer decipher it for you.