That's not how I remember it...

version

Well-known member
Anyone find themselves struggling with the disconnect between footage of the past and how it actually looked at the time? I can't really envision the 90s, despite living through them, because the grainy footage we have now seems to have usurped what I actually saw. The 90s were grainy the way the 50s were black and white.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
There was this show on tv the other day with news clips from the beginning of the 2000's and everybody just talked differently. It felt very strange to hear it because it was the sorta distinct inflection I associate with clips from the 70's or 80's but it was still there in the 2000's. Juxtaposed with the current hosts, it was impossible not to notice it. I was baffled by how fast things move.

I don't have a tv, so I haven't watched any live tv news or something like that for a good year maybe. Another thing I was struck by was the dramatization of the stories. I remember it so monotone and dispassionate. There was background mood music, cliff hangers, shit like that. It was grotesque.
 
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entertainment

Well-known member
We're talking national danish tv channel. Supposed to be sober and conservative. It was like seeing your parents drunk.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The season Mourinho arrived in the PL. All down hill from there.

Watched Se7ev by complete chance last week. 1995.

25years? Think it was the jungle thread about that year, specifically, that wobbled the thought momentarily. Hadn’t seen the film since its release, not that I rate it very much if at all. Nothing remarkable but something uncanny akin to History Today went off in my head, as in “Feel those 25 years, all gone? That’s your youth, that was”.
 

version

Well-known member
That's a film that still looks pretty good. A little dated due to having that Marilyn Manson - Nine Inch Nails - Silent Hill aesthetic, but it still looks sharp.
 

version

Well-known member
Cinema's a weird one because stuff like Fight Club (1999) or American Psycho (2000) doesn't really look that dated in comparison to how a film from '79 or '80 looked when they were released.
 
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version

Well-known member
I just cannot imagine actually living in say the 60s. It only exists as blurry photos, contemporary footage and so on to me. I can't imagine actually moving through it the way I can walk down the street now and see and hear and feel things in real time and "full quality".
 

version

Well-known member
Shame I couldn't flesh this one out. It's something I feel very strongly, but struggle to articulate. I need to come up with a term for it, or find one someone else has.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
My oldest reliable memories are of the aughts and I feel the opposite. Enough of the world might have been digitized at that point to avoid the effect you are talking about. When I watch old sports highlights and see the grain, the old digital scoreboards and tickers, I feel like Im revisiting the time exactly as I remember it. Same goes for news stories, movies, ads and etc. I think theres something unreal about high definition representation and the clear but not too clear tech of the aughts feels closer to memory/actual perception.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I just cannot imagine actually living in say the 60s. It only exists as blurry photos, contemporary footage and so on to me. I can't imagine actually moving through it the way I can walk down the street now and see and hear and feel things in real time and "full quality".
Getting out in nature I feel like I can see through the past. Ill think how the forest image or rock face would be no different for eyes from however far back I choose to imagine. Makes me think of Deleuze when he talks about the schizophrenic being every man throughout history, or really any vaguely phenomenological thinker- the deconstruction of seeing as a depersonalized, almost inhuman thing.

I may also just have a different experience of media than you / am missing exactly the feeling you are getting at. I saw Once Upon of Time in Hollywood while in California and I remember walking around after words readily seeing the world as if it was still the 60's.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
My oldest reliable memories are of the aughts and I feel the opposite..
It's funny with some things I think that, others not.
With football that Version mentioned, I was watching some 80s clips not too long ago expecting them to be laughable, but they looked more like today than I expected. But perhaps that was because I was over-preparing.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
It's funny with some things I think that, others not.
With football that Version mentioned, I was watching some 80s clips not too long ago expecting them to be laughable, but they looked more like today than I expected. But perhaps that was because I was over-preparing.
Its suprisingly easy to find high quality replay of 80's/90's basketball, some of it looks as good as the stuff from early aughts. Film isnt as efficient but we knew how to make it look good. Though Im sure there's something about compression through reposting Im missing here.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There is no doubt sports evolve and football has reached an unbelievable level now (arguably at the expense of entertainment) - but it doesn't evolve that fast that people from a few years back look stupid. Film quality though.... I couldn't comment.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Anyone find themselves struggling with the disconnect between footage of the past and how it actually looked at the time? I can't really envision the 90s, despite living through them, because the grainy footage we have now seems to have usurped what I actually saw. The 90s were grainy the way the 50s were black and white.
Do you think it has anything to do with our attention spans being shortened, which may somehow effect how we archive memories? Maybe our memory is getting more and more optimized for the short term, since we are trafficking through increasingly information-dense environments?

Its not just that more is happening (although arguably so), but that we are enabled to be aware of more and more, and that draws processing power away from long term memory? That is, what constitutes long term memory is, in absolute terms, constantly being shortened - because the information within our experiences is getting denser, so the parameters need to be adjusted accordingly? Maybe for those of us who are more acclimated to this information dense environment, time and/or memory are dilated or contracted in weird ways? Not sure if the case could be made scientifically, but that doesn't seem to be our concern.

An attempt in other words: Your farming/storage capacity is met by ten square acres of corn, with one stalk grown every five feet, in a grid. If the corn density were to be increased, say to one stalk every three feet, and yet your maximum storing capacity were to remain fixed, you would have to shorten your acreage accordingly, or else risk ruining that which you invest energy/money/attention in.

In terms of processing things, information-density seems to objectively be increasing. In fact, online environments are arguably spaces of pure information. And while our abstract processing capacities may be increasingly accordingly, perhaps the demands are too high, and we need to narrow our frame a bit.

This does seem to deviate entirely from your point, but to try and return (or just deviate in another direction): Perhaps as our tech-archives become more and more robust, and are increasingly better are capturing experiences, the information of our experiences can be more and more consolidated into potent and affective clips or reels (memes?) that can serve to supplant ever-longer spans of memories. Maybe at some point, our tech and/or pharma could instantaneously neurologically trigger lucid zeitgeist memories/impressions, bypassing the need for media, because it would be immediate. Arguably the media we have is just the mediocre means of that kind of surgically precise impression-tech.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Sort of like the hive media mind is drinking its own koolaid, positing its depictions of reality as reality. It does it by affecting us in the way you describe: by letting our media sufficiently supplant our memories, because we can afford to. Moreover, we are in control of our media in a way that we do not control reality. That is, we can control how our media represents reality, but we cannot (as robustly) control how reality presents itself. This control lets the hive-intelligence steer its own evolution, bound for dematerialization, as far as I can tell.
 

version

Well-known member
I think it's a phenomenon of mediation and technological progress. You can't go back, memory can be vague and the image is powerful. It usurps memory and tricks you into thinking that's how it was, or that's how you remember it. That the 90s were grainy, the 40s were black and white. You know the way your eyes operate and that you're watching a recording, but it's the closest you can get to looking directly at the past and there's an immediacy and potency that comes with actually seeing something.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah, and its good enough to stick, and pass as history. Yeah there is something about it, still, that I can't quite put my finger on, yet alone express.
 
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