I attended a great talk by Professor Eugene Fiume on Digital Media today. He showed examples of technically brilliant computer graphics, which as he put it, still lacks “irony”. He also showed examples of great art where there is a lot of irony despite the lack of detail or technical brilliance (a clip from the Disney movie “Dumbo” was really moving).
The talk made me think about Flickr, the photosharing site. There’s a lot of technically brilliant photos on Flickr, which are excellent in exposure, focus, etc, but they are not that interesting. On the other hand, YouTube has a lot of poorly lit, grainy, shaky, technically crappy videos which are very compelling. The YouTube videos have “irony” in the Fiume sense.
Why is that? Why do YouTube contributors “get it”, while Flickr contributors don’t? Is it video vs photographs, or is it YouTube vs Flickr (the way they are organized) that matters?