Technology has advanced again, and your father feels out of date having all his boxes of old photographic slides sitting around when you could scan them for him and keep them electronically. You are scanning the slides. If you scan them at very low resolution—say one pixel per image—the job will be very efficient and quick but you get more or less nothing; a plain block that averages the colors of the whole picture. As you increase the resolution you get images that look less and less chunky, then less and less blurry, then more and more like the picture, and pretty soon you have something that to any unaided eye pretty much is the picture.
This point of practical equivalence probably comes well before you’ve reached the maximum quality possible for your scanner; even the consumer-level equipment has been able for some time to render details much smaller than you can see. In fact the equipment available now is at or close to the point where it can resolve details at the same scale as the grains of the photo emulsion. This almost means that the scan is identical to the scanned—“almost” because even though the scanner’s CCDs are operating at the same scale as the grains there is still a difference in their geometry; the CCDs are organized in a neat grid and the grains are not, so most pixels will still be looking at zones covering parts of two or more adjacent grains and averaging their values. For every practical purpose the two images are the same, but strictly speaking some information has been lost or changed.
So for really accurate scanning we should make the resolution even finer. If we can reduce our pixel size to 1/8 the width of the emulsion grains we’ll have something like 64 pixels per grain; at that scale the scan of the slide begins to be not so much an image of the photo as a photograph of all the grains in it.
This is extremely accurate scanning. But is there any reason to stop here? I don’t see why. Maybe the ever-advancing technology will give us resolutions down to the molecular level. Atomic? Why not. Actually, to really duplicate the slide what we want is a holographic representation of the three-dimensional arrangement of all the matter in the photo emulsion—and there we might consider stopping, since the information about the quantum states of all those particles is not permitted within the universe, so we’ve pretty much bottomed out. Still, this is a very high quality scan. Although come to think of it we could enrich it further by adding a few more bytes per femtopixel to express our best guesses about that uncapturable quantum information.
Of course all this data stopped being image information way back—back around the point we considered “hi-res” fifteen or twenty years ago. Any data deeper than what’s visible to your eye is irrelevant to the image and is not true of the image. The scan of all the atoms in a photograph depicts atomic relationships, not image relationships; it’s a representation of a competely different thing. The thing it represents is real and might indeed be of interest for certain purposes, but not image purposes – and of course the quantum-state best guesses we applied in the ultimate step are fiction, and not really “true” of anything.
Nevertheless, if your scan goes to any of these subficial depths it irretrievably contains all that superinformation, and anything you do with the scan, any processing you subject it to, must account for it all. In fact, given the nature of digital processes, which tend to work from the bottom up, it probably has to start with the non-imagic information and work up towards visibility. The processing has to be about something other than the image; hyperresolution means the thing you have to work with is no longer the image.
Hyperresolution is the analysis of a thing into more information than it contains. This can happen in literal ways for technical reasons, as in the scanning example, or more abstractly because of things like business practices or market forces. It’s possible because resolution and analysis can be pursued to any arbitrary degree (unless you hit an absolute wall like quantum uncertainty) and will always produce data—but data is not meaningful; data is dust. Bits of data connected to each other by relationships into patterns make information, which is potentially meaningful, but that potential isn’t realized until the information is apprehended by an interested party and converted into knowledge; that’s when things can start meaning.
A person intentionally analyzing something wants knowledge for a reason and will have decided what elements and aspects of the thing he’s interested in; these elements will be related to each other in various ways, so in some sense they must be of comparable scale. That scale determines the appropriate resolution—or depth, depending on which way you’re looking at it—of the analysis. A traffic planner will be interested in the number and kind of vehicles crossing a bridge and the aggregate rate at which they get past it; a structural engineer will be interested in the number and kind of vehicles and also the weight, number of axles and speed of each one—a finer resolution of the bridge-fact. The different kinds of analysis each person does determines their interest horizon with respect to the situation, and what’s information for the engineer may be useless data to the planner, just as the specific contents of the vehicles is meaningless to either of them. Everything beyond the horizon is dust.
Exposing the planner to the engineer’s dust probably won’t cause any problems, because he already knows which information he wants and he can understand it out of the engineering data and disregard anything else. This may not always be the case though. The image broken down into femtopixels is incomprehensible in image terms—for one thing the femtopixels are much too small to contain any “color” information; we’re well below the scale of wavelengths of light here. All possibilities for “color” are determined not by the data in each femtopixel but by the relationships among the femtopixels—and I don’t know what those are; their ways of relating have nothing to do with my ways of understanding. To get the image back from the hyperresolved analysis I have to rely on methods that don’t have anything to do with images—that in fact are unrelated to any human experience—so once I’ve done that, how do I know what I’ve done? This data from beyond my interest horizon does not correspond to any intent of mine; the hyperresolved image is meaningless.
Broadcast television can provide tens of channels; cable or satellite television can provide hundreds. The shift to supertelevision made it possible to break out of the traditional general-interest programming into specialty channels catering to particular interests: music, movies, news, sports, newer music, less popular sports, children’s programming, women’s programming, men’s programming, black people’s programming, Hispanic people’s programming, local programming, someone else’s local programming, even less popular sports, history, comedy, things you can buy, science fiction, science, old movies, recent movies, independent movies, old television, old game shows, cartoons, old cartoons, Japanese cartoons, animals, foreign television, right-wing news, technology, computer technology, military technology, military history, weather and Congress. And more besides. And a few failures: they tried “romance”, but no one would watch it; they tried “left-wing” news, but no one would show it.
It seemed like a logical thing to do. Hadn’t the problem with general-interest programming always been that there was nothing interesting on? And didn’t that mostly mean nothing on right now that corresponded to your particular interests right now? Well then! Here it is. Here it all is. Right now. Finer resolution of the interests-problem.
And it worked for a while as expected, and created the celebrated Splintering Of The Audience that played havoc with the advertising order, decimating the revenues of the broadcast networks and necessitating the adoption of “reality” programming.
But apparently that was temporary; the specialty-interest channels have lost their specializations. At least as of this month the History channel has become mostly technology and crime; Comedy Central runs the most important news and talk shows; MTV is reality and gossip; Arts & Entertainment is almost all crime; Animal Planet favors shows about sasquatches and other non-animals. USA is almost entirely the many varieties of Law & Order—which does make it more specialized than it used to be, but not the sort of specialty that anyone would have anticipated when the specializing all started. And Sci Fi, having spread out into psychic talk shows, pretend-reality ghost hunts and pro wrestling, has denied everything and changed its name to the inexplicable, usefully meaningless “Sy Fy”.
This is not because the junior executives who run these operations are disloyal to their subjects; they have had to do this to retain market share and revenue. The reason for the degenerations is that the “interests” these channels set out to service are hyperresolved—too small for reality. An innocent viewer inducted into a focus group might say that he’s interested in history and wants to watch shows about that, but such “interests” only exist at the level of hobbies, whims and likings—it’s not really a thing. That viewer is also interested in breakfast—and to a slightly greater degree. You can’t really be “interested” in a whole subject category; you can be interested in some thing, and then that thing happens to fit in some category—but only as a convenience, not because that’s what it is. You might be interested, for some reason you have, in the Napoleonic wars, and because of that you’d watch a show about them. If that’s so then you are probably not especially interested in how the pyramids were built and would not watch a show about that – or if you would, and the reason you’d watch both shows is that you’re “interested in history”, then either your “interest” isn’t serious or you don’t really understand what “history” means.
That kind of “interest” is not viable as an economic entity, so all the specialty channels have had to go off-topic to attract a few more points of audience-share here and there, and as they degenerate we wind up with dozens of general-interest channels with special-interest names and roughly the same mix of programming that we had before the supertelevision—except now reduplicated over hundreds of channels. When the televisual universe comprises only three or four channels any given program will be watched by a lot of people simply because it’s what’s on and people like getting entertained—and then once tuned in they may even find it interesting too. The advertising you can do to this large audience will provide enough revenue to produce decent programs, so a few times a year you can run a special-event show about fish, and you can afford to have Jacques Cousteau make it, and he’ll do so intentionally, and it will be about something and despite being only television it might be pretty good. And it can mean, because it’s the fish show tonight instead of everything else it might have been and that makes a difference. But when you start the Fish Channel you can never get more of the audience than the specific fish-watchers—and even they won’t be with you all the time—so your revenue is much lower to start with and you need 168 hours of specifically piscine programming every week, week after week, forever. You can only afford shows that can only afford to use a lot of stock footage that reappears from one hour to the next, made by nobodies who are willing to say nonthings like “scientists were desperate to unlock the secret mysteries of these mysterious squid”.
Those shows aren’t instead of anything—they’re always there. And they aren’t about the fish, they’re about the necessity of filling up the Fish Channel. They are not a thing that is done, they’re something that happens, and keeps on happening. They are indifferent, and they can’t mean.
But because supertelevision makes it possible to have hundreds of channels, it is necessary to have hundreds of channels, and it doesn’t make sense to have hundreds of the same thing, so they must specialize and they must hyperresolve our interest into dozens of “interests”, and there must be the meaningless and low-quality Fish Channel. And when you had three general channels to choose from you would have checked the listings, seen something interesting, and turned it on on purpose, or finding nothing tonight would do something else. But the hyperresolved hundreds provide bits of miscellaneous interest-debris that isn’t really interesting to you, but is sort of interesting, interesting enough to turn on—why not? Not on purpose, but because why wouldn’t you—and you’re not really watching it anyway because you’re playing Facebook at the same time, so if there do happen to be any vestigial meanings in the three back-to-back episodes of Fish Gone Wild they aren’t meaning to you, who are present but not attending. Solid objects can be accepted or refused; dust gets in all over the place.
Not that television was ever so meaningful in the first place. Its biggest problem has always been that it’s always running. Communication is an act, not a habit—you speak when you have a thing to say. But economic, logistical and marketing effects make it impractical and unrealistic to offer television on an action basis, running programs because someone made them because they had these particular things to mean. Instead there is the habitual discharge of material in a serial format; what should be a discrete communicative act that is performed is hyperresolved into an unbounded continuity that just keeps happening—typically on a weekly basis, but then often accelerated by syndication to recur on a daily or even hourly pattern. Have you never noticed how dusty your TV set always is?
Besides the Splintering Of The Audience another thing we all have to always know and be retold about the current state of television is that the audience as a whole is actually shrinking. The imposition of supertelevision initially had the expected effect of increasing the total exposure hours, largely because hyperresolution reduced the difference between “interested” and “not interested”, making the difference between watching and not watching less significant – there was less point to turning the set off. But now we’re always on internet, and because of the new habit often never get around to turning the set on.
The Internet, clearly, is far more hyperresolving even than supertelevision. Even though supertelevision is hyperresolved across both interests and time it still exhibits the chunking of a schedule. There is the superfluous variety of programs running continually, but any given program still begins at a certain time and ends at another one, and once it ends it isn’t running anymore, and while it is running that channel is prevented from running something else. The internet is not like that. The “channels” are innumerable and all content simultaneous; almost all of its material starts at the exact moment that you want to look at it, is freely interruptible and repeatable, and everything remains continuously available.
Supertelevision hyperresolved the audience to the microdemographic level, then had to retrench because its elements were too small to be meaningful to its revenue model. Most forms of internet emission have little or no revenue requirement, so it’s possible to resolve all the way down to the level of the individual with no loss of viability—there’s nothing to prevent the servicing even of interests that nobody has, which no one can fail to notice is something that happens all the time in there.
This points to a bizarre effect of this radical degree of resolution: the infotainment process has been broken down into units so small that the physics changes and the flows reverse, and instead of going into the participants the material now comes out of them. Rather than the collective activity of watching a lot of things that don’t matter, now the audience is occupied by the atomized activity of saying a lot of things that don’t matter.
As the web has developed it has showed a continuation of the hyperresolving trend. First there were personal web pages, which were about your cat or similar things that might be significant to you but couldn’t possibly mean to anyone else. These were relatively elaborate constructions though; meaningless, but creations that could only be made by people who bothered to learn how to and gave some thought to putting their pages together in particular ways on purpose for reasons they had. Anyone could do it—that was the major innovation—but only those who cared enough to figure it out would do so.
Then, of course, blogs. This medium quickly developed into a technology of readymades you didn’t have to learn for people who were eager to report what they saw on their way back to the cubicle from lunch every day without caring enough to go to the trouble of creating their own displays. Then MySpace, Facebook, Twitter—each step requiring less investment to achieve your “expression” while reducing the amount possible to express and speeding up the rate at which you can do it. At which you must do it. Expression becomes frictionless and efficient.
All these things are primarily forms of incontinence, requiring negligible effort to emit negligible statements, more or less continuously. Once in the habit you just keep doing it—and should, or people will wonder. You take up the broadcaster’s burden and keep emitting material not because there is a thing to be meant but because you are there and you are on. Your experience is reduced to data; a hundred tweets does not make a 2,800-word essay. The experience of you is exploded into dust.
Avoiding hyperresolution—and infinite meaninglessness generally—requires the imposition of inefficiencies. Your thought can only mean in opposition to its contraries; it can only be significant in overcoming resistance to its expression. The essay matters because your interest surpassed your inertia and you wrote that whole thing, then its quality surpassed the editor’s desire to publish something else. To overcome these frictions and resistances requires the gathering of some impulses and the elimination of others; a focus into this direction instead of every direction. When hyperresolution makes everything possible there is no priority; when you can freely and effortlessly say both this and that without having to choose between them there is no possibility of importance for either.
