Nikio

It seems like years since my last valuable posting (if it had any value anyways...). It is not that I have any kind of writers block or anything, it's just that I don't have much time or that I'm uncertain about things that I want to write about. It's like I don't have all the details figured out yet.

But there is one thing that I've been thinking about lately and I find it very important within the media theory. And that is the question of resolution. I would define it as the amount of information per physical measure of it's medium. Huh... let me explain.

Basically what I mean is that if you have a high-resolution image would mean that every pixel is well used and that there are no parts of an image where information is lost. For example; if you resize 600x400 image to 6000x4000 pix, you actually loose resolution because now you have the same amount of information with a lot more pixels used. So a goal of every photographer would be to have as high resolution photos as possible (not in the terms of actual pixel count but in the terms of how efficiently are they used). This is why we need very sharp lenses. But this is not limited to technical terms. An image that contains parts that don't support the "whole story" of it is just as well a low resolutioin image. It wasted it's space on unnecessary elements and therefore the ratio between space that is used well and the whole space is very low. This is the kind of resolution I want to focus on.

This roule would apply to any kind of media. A high-resolution speech is a speech where every word counts. There is not bullshit in it - take one word out and everything colapses. A high-resolution storyline would produce a movie where every sceene servs the function of the general narrative, perhaps even on more levels (not just to support one aspect of the story, but many aspect or even sub-plots). A high-resolution chess game contains moves that serve more than one function at the time (attack, defense and perhaps material gain). I could go on with this, but I hope you see the point...

So why is that important you might ask? I think it is very important because every "piece of medium" is a limited resource. A newspaper can contain only this many of pages, so it is very important how we use them. And even a single page can cover only this much of space, again, let's use it wisely. The same goes for a photograph (only this many of pixels), music (only this many of bars), dance (only this many of moves)...

Thanks for reading.