Not long ago, I attended a gallery talk at GCC presented by a photographer from Southern Vermont. His beautiful and poignant work was shot with digital cameras. Towards the end of his presentation a student asked the artist “Could you have taken the same photographs and had the same show with film?” The response was, “yes — but it would
I couldn’t stop thinking about the student’s question, the artist’s response and those Hollywood directors. Why would the likes of such great directors as Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino work only in film?
My hobby is music. Listening, collecting, reading about it and going to live performances. I thought about my old record collection, cassette tapes, CDs and now, downloads. I love that I can have all my music on my phone or up in the clouds somewhere. I also thought about the quality of the sound itself.
Just as the photographer suggested that images captured digitally would be different than those on film, so too music recorded and listened to digitally would be different from analog/high fidelity recordings. The latter producing a fuller, more nuanced and complex sound. So I bought a devise for my music system that adds depth and richness, making the sound similar to the analog/high fidelity experience. Not only did it sound better, but I felt the difference. And there is some brain research that speaks to that impact. That must be why Spielberg and Tarantino use only film. It is about the nuances and the depth of film as opposed to the binary experience of digital cameras.
Webster’s defines binary as “consisting of, indicating, or involving two.” It is the foundation of all computing and digital technology. On, off. That’s it, on and off. In other words our phones, pads, desktops, TVs, radios etc. are now all digitized and run by binary systems that simplify the coding to either on or off.
I then started to think about all of the ways in which that binary process has seeped into our political, social, intellectual and economic institutions. It is as if our whole way of thinking has become binary. Things today are either right or wrong, good or bad, rich or poor, have or have not, black or white — on or off. We live in binary times.
But life and the issues we all face are just not that simple. Whatever happened to the nuances, the complexity, and the gray areas of an issue? I guess they all went to the same place that our middle class did. There seems to be no middle ground anymore, no areas of an issue that speak to anything other than a simple solution framed by the simple perspective. Whether the discussion is about race, religion, the economy, sexual identity, education or immigration, it’s either good or bad, right or wrong, smart or dumb, black or white, black or white — black or white.
I recently rediscovered these words written by Charles Dickens, and I now experience and understand them very differently from the first time I read them. Dickens wrote:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” Dickens then adds “in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” Dickens published “A Tale of Two Cities” in 1859, but he might have written that paragraph just yesterday about our current state of affairs.
I now wear a wristwatch again just to add the seconds back into my life. That wristwatch, with its seconds hand in motion, is also a daily reminder that people and issues are not just good or bad, right or wrong, smart or dumb, black or white. There is a depth, richness and complexity to society’s challenges — and to life — that we must embrace and understand in order to solve the significant issues before us. It is essential that we rid ourselves of the simplistic binary mentality of our times. Our democracy and our planet are depending on it.
Robert Pura is president of Greenfield Community College