Quality vs. Convenience
We’ve seen some pretty amazing technological advances in our media players in the last few years, and it’s interesting to consider the affect it has had on our personal standards of quality. On one hand, we want our the TV screens bigger—sometimes filling entire rooms—and the picture more beautiful than ever. On the other hand, we’ll gladly give all that up to watch a movie that looks like it’s been through a Cuisinart on a screen the size of a business card as long as we can have it now, now, now.
In the 50’s, Ray Croc gave us McDonald’s and satisfied our need for immediate dining gratification. The food was barely palatable, but it was fast and it was cheap. Now we’re getting it in the form of media mediocrity: crappy-sounding mp3’s and compressed-to-hell videos, delivered straight to our desktops in the blink of an eye. And we’re okay with that because we are addicted to immediacy. We’re willing to trade high-quality audio for the convenience of having our entire music collection on a tiny, portable hard drive with attached ear buds, or high definition video for the ability to watch our favorite TV shows on the bus.
Remember records, those acetate discs that everyone thought were destined for a landfill? You couldn’t listen to them in your car, they scratched easily, and they warped if you left them on top of the radiator. But, they’re still around, and by some accounts making quite a comeback. Why? Quality. Vinyl sounds better, or so the audiophiles say, some of whom have offices here at Popular Front.
Convenience is the hare and quality the tortoise. And you remember how that story ended. Quality will always prevail in the end. Or so I hope.
Eventually, we’ll have the best of both worlds, and none of this will matter. Those internet “tubes” will be big enough to deliver high-quality media files as quickly as we can say, “All Hail Google.” In fact, YouTube recently started offering videos in HD (about a year behind Vimeo), though they are still pretty highly compressed and nothing compared to watching a Blu-ray disc on a widescreen LCD.
So until the future arrives, let’s just sit back and enjoy some YouTube videos of cats stuck in bags.
posted by Eric Kassel on December 12th, 2008 at 1:52 pm Permanent link to this post
