YouTube and Lo-Fi Truth.
The digital age has delivered a paradigm shift in what we, as viewers, perceive as truthful. I've
written a number of times about this evolution that seems in stark contrast to our much lauded high definition obsessions.
A sensible logic would dictate that the better the quality of a moving image the more 'true to life' it will appear - a natrual evolution on from Black and white and mono sound which are profoundly 'unnatural'. And yet the digital age of mobile phone cameras, on-line video and handy cams has delivered exactly the opposite. We now have a cinematic social aesthetic that associates 'truth' and the 'real' with low quality, pixelated and distorted imagery.
Blair Witch Project embraced it with the handycam. NYPD blue changed cop drama forever with the hand-held whip-panning camera and with endless streams of nightly news being sourced from amateur bystanders with mobile phones we bread a very different aesthetic of 'truth'.
A prime example of this has been seen of late on Australian TV with a series of ads by an electrical goods rental company. The ads feature a personal direct address testimonial that plays out inside a distinctly YouTube on-line player. Moreover the video image is pixelated, colour staved and holds all the hallmarks of compressed web-video. The ads do not feature on-line and were developed specifically for prime-time broadcast. Thus what we have is a specific emulation of the particular techno-aesthetics from one medium in another medium where those techno-aesthetic traits (ie pixelation, compression artefacts and a video player frame) do not naturally exist.
Why? Because our engrained cultural and psychological association with 'visual truth' is now embedded in the low-fi aesthetic. This may then be read as..
High-Quality = False
Low-Quality = True
What a strange and fascinating world we live in?
