LizzieMaine
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Running a special film series this week in which all features are being shown from 35mm film prints, it occured to me that even though film has been obsolete as a mass-market exhibition medium since the early part of this decade, the image of a strip of film remains an abstract icon of the movie business -- consider how often you see something like this:
Which is simply an abstraction of this:
Something which was once an everyday part of the real world now survives largely as an abstraction used by a generation which has had little or no connection to the actual item that inspired it.
There's a lot of this around us today as the artifacts of The Era, one by one, fall into obsolescence and extinction. Consider the universal icon for "gasoline."
It's a generic drawing that everyone recognizes as a gas pump, because, once, gas pumps actually looked like that:
But you'd be hard pressed to find such a pump still in everyday use in a setting where any ordinary person might encounter it. Since the 1980s, pumps don't look anything like that -- and yet the icon remains. People accept it as a "gas pump," even though it doesn't resemble any gas pump they actually use -- or, possibly, that they have *ever* used.
Or consider that the microphone input on the computer you're using right now is very probably represented by an icon like this:
A generic "microphone" symbol that doesn't really look like any actual microphone in wide use today -- but which is, in fact, a very simplified drawing of a very specific microphone which was once widely used in broadcasting -- the RCA 77 series, manufactured from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.
There are many other such instances in which literal objects of the recent past survive in the minds of today's generation largely as abstractions, even among people who've never actually seen a single example of the real object. How many others can you think of?
Which is simply an abstraction of this:
Something which was once an everyday part of the real world now survives largely as an abstraction used by a generation which has had little or no connection to the actual item that inspired it.
There's a lot of this around us today as the artifacts of The Era, one by one, fall into obsolescence and extinction. Consider the universal icon for "gasoline."
It's a generic drawing that everyone recognizes as a gas pump, because, once, gas pumps actually looked like that:
But you'd be hard pressed to find such a pump still in everyday use in a setting where any ordinary person might encounter it. Since the 1980s, pumps don't look anything like that -- and yet the icon remains. People accept it as a "gas pump," even though it doesn't resemble any gas pump they actually use -- or, possibly, that they have *ever* used.
Or consider that the microphone input on the computer you're using right now is very probably represented by an icon like this:
A generic "microphone" symbol that doesn't really look like any actual microphone in wide use today -- but which is, in fact, a very simplified drawing of a very specific microphone which was once widely used in broadcasting -- the RCA 77 series, manufactured from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.
There are many other such instances in which literal objects of the recent past survive in the minds of today's generation largely as abstractions, even among people who've never actually seen a single example of the real object. How many others can you think of?
