A paradox of the information age is the trend towards low-resolution. Compare your experience to that of your grandparents:

• voice quality — your cellphone no match for their good old Bell telephone
• image resolution — your iPod videos or YouTube feeds as mud compared to the 35 or 70mm prints of their grand old movie palaces
• language — your email, chat, and texting often mere abbreviated grunting by contrast to their old-fashioned letter-writing

A similar trend, too, in attention — a tendency toward frayed time, our world designed for distraction, with interruption the rule, everything coming at us in overlapping blasts of information, cut into bite-sizes.

Our minds are elsewhere — our attention as low-res as our vision.

Such are the symptoms, if you will. Offset by many advantages, which we are quite sold on, the chief of these being the ubiquity of information and the instantaneity of search.

Fidelity

The American Heritage Dictionary definition:

1. Faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances. 2. Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event; accuracy. 3. The degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.

“Image fidelity,” then, should imply more than accurate reproduction (though that’s important) — but also faithfulness to a given truth.

On the positive side, this leads to considerations pursued in the parallel thread Advanced Realism. For now, let’s keep our focus here on the negative flipside.