Conversation

I now recognize as a bit of cinematic grammar I always unconsciously recognized (“move camera in one direction and slowly zooming in, spiral-wise, for ‘cinematic’ shot”) but didn’t consciously know until pointed out.
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Good for me: my own videos will look more polished due to learning what’s obviously an effective technique. Bad for the world: lowered diversity in ways of seeing. As the trick spreads, many interesting “unprofessional” shots will be lost along with plain bad ones.
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This homogenization of ways of seeing and being seen is all over the place. Most pronounced in the ways women have learned to take a narrow range of selfies that work. It’s the new make-up. But it extends to everything and all sensory media.
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One of the first videos I saw on tiktok was a selfie posing trick “to make your butt look thicc.” Then I realized a) that pose had started with celebrities/models and b) had now proliferated ALL OVER. The “twist with butt out” mutant pose was now among the most viral.
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Unlike more organic, bottom-up visual grammar memes (I suspect for eg, the cute Asian habit of doing bunny ears/v-for-victory signs in photos is organic), I’d guess 90% of seeing/being seen memes today percolate down from professional broadcast media. Trickle-down theory.
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I suspect this is to 21st century what consumerization was to the 20th. I’m mostly a text guy, and even I’ve picked up way more audio/video/image tricks without intending to than I ever expected to.
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People who consciously set out to learn can put a century of Hollywood and Madison Avenue metis into their ways of seeing and in their finger-tips knowledge of handling iPhones. Both amazing and depressing like I said. A new literacy, but a new homogenization as well.
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Text is interesting because mass literacy is now a century old in most parts of the world. Net good, but definitely also a major loss of diversity in language richness initially as humans gave up local, illegible speechways for more legible non-local institutional speechways.
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I’d say for language, it began with cheap offset print and office work. Homogenization progressed for ~100 years. But then began to reverse with the internet. Now language is re-acquiring terroir. There are hyperlocal Very Online speechways that resemble pre-literacy speechways.
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If richer media follow a similar trajectory... a few decades of growing homogenization before a new diversity kicks off somehow. I suspect AIs will play a weird role in this.
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