Sterne’s “Compression: A Loose History” discusses the historical and theoretical contexts under which compression of thought and language, audio, and data have emerged. In regards to the piece, I am especially interested in the variations between the high definition media and the low definition media, especially when thinking on their potential to shape education and knowledge. When discussing the alternative high definition files that need to be compressed – low definition ‘aesthetic’ files, I was surprised to see that the author made no mention of In Defense of the Poor Image, written by artist Hito Steryerl.  Steryerl makes several points about the affordances of the poor image, one of them being that poor images are able to spread quickly and easily its low resolution is able to accommodate a variety of infrastructure, especially in places that do not have access to high bandwidth connections. She writes “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.”

This brings us to the discussion of verisimilitude. In this context, it means the ability for technology to portray what we perceive to be reality, what we perceive to be true. Sterne introduces his work with the sentence “this is the story of communication as being about the anxiety over the loss of meaning through a succession of technical forms. The assumption here is that progress in technology comes through its ability to produce verisimilitude” (32). However, it is important to think about whose truth technology is perpetuating. As we have discussed in our previous classes, technology and data are not all knowing apolitical machines that have the ability to be objective because the biases of the creators are built into them. As we are able to produce more and more media and construct more infrastructure to accommodate this media, whose truths are we prioritizing?

Low definition images are powerful because they are able to be spread more quickly, they can be created by anyone, and they are unusual to the vast majority of media consumers at this point. With “bootleg aesthetics”, Lucas Hilderbrand “finds these videos all the more affectively powerful because of their low definition” (34). I believe low definition images are more powerful than the ability to compress because of the context under which they exist in this day and age. When compressing a concept, image, audio byte, there is information that has to be trimmed and therefore lost during the process of compression and transmission. With low definition images, what the user captures is what is shared. The user captured their truth with the creation of that media source. In terms of information compression, if the creator is not the compressor, an outside source is determining what is and is not important. How might their biases skew the information being transmitted in an unintentional way?

Side note: It might be interesting to explore the relationship between coding and cryptography, but I don’t know enough about cryptography enough to have a coherent statement or opinion about that relationship.