We will never have the experience of hearing Jenny Lind singing, or Benjamin Franklin speaking. During their time on this Earth, there was no recording technology to capture their voices for future generations.
Similarly, we will never know what it was like to see a performance of the great stage actor David Garrick. His life came and went before the invention of film recording, so our knowledge of his performances will forever only be secondhand.
Each of these recording technologies represents a schism in human experience: Anything that happened before the invention of a given recording technology is, in a particular sense, unknowable.
I wonder what future recording technology will create a similar schism. Will some future technology, one that we cannot yet imagine, create new possibilities for preserving the human experience for future generations?
Perhaps people will look back ruefully upon our own era and say “Before 2030, we can never know what … was truly like.”
If you look at video from the last century, it’s pretty grim. I’m sure no expense was spared recording and broadcasting the 1976 Olympics. But it looks pretty smugey on our modern hi-res screens.
You can argue that the other way. Video technology, like all recording technologies, continues to improve.
You can look back at the past and say “That used to be terrible.” Or you can look toward the future and say “That is going to be amazing!”
By the way, I suspect that at some point soon we will be able to process that 1976 footage to look as though it was recorded using more recent and therefore higher quality technology.
Excellent point about the future improving past recordings. There are a number of colorized / remastered videos on YouTube of early 1900s street scenes that look pretty good on modern screens.
Another step change is the sheer quantity of video captured and stored now. Last century, recording film/video was an event requiring special equipment and planning. Most unexpected news events were not recorded (the Zapruder film is a notable exception). Now, we expect to see footage of every plane crash or explosion. Every lamp post and doorbell is constantly watching, everybody walks around with a movie camera in their pocket, ready to record at a moment’s notice.