The Wiki man

Rory Sutherland

16 January 2008

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The attractions of lo-fi technology

Most writers of science fiction have foreseen human communication becoming more sophisticated and realistic. Brave New World has the feelies; 1984 has telescreens; every spaceship seems to have a colossal video wall on which the Emperor Zorquon can appear in Dolby surround sound to threaten the crew with unspeakable things. But more interesting than the media everybody predicted are those nobody did: the text message, twitter.com, the Facebook status update, YouTube. All these are the opposite of the High-Definition experience. They are low-bandwidth, low-effort media — what Malcolm McLaren calls Lo-Fi. And that’s precisely why people like them — for they combine low demands of the message creator with low expectations in the recipient.

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Enowning

January 17th, 2008 1:51pm Report this comment

Most new technology products are developed so that they'll look cool when demo-ed to journalists, pundits, and so on, and no so that they'll be practical to users.

Rory Sutherland

January 18th, 2008 9:13pm Report this comment

A very fair point. At the recent CES show, a NY Times correspondent made this very point about a miraculously thin (15mm, I think) Plasma-screen TV. In short that it would give you a very brief thrill when first viewed sideways on... this to be followed by five utterly unspectacular years spent viewing the damn thing on the square as God intended.