Motion Pictures
Learning about motion pictures is more than just looking at the impact individual movies have on a person. If that were the case, we’d be here forever. Movies, tv shows, etc. do have an impact on people in many different ways. Different genres hit different parts of your heart, but how does the creation of motion pictures truly affect people to this day? As a society, do we benefit from this creation? Have we self-destructed more than built ourselves up since this invention? It is hard to say the overall impact considering everyone has taken it differently, but to really dive into this we have to take a look back at where this all began.
Thomas Edison was the creator of motion picture in 1888, that is, the first successful creator. The creation in 1888 was the first motion picture camera, to be more precise. Edison had the help of a man named William Dickson, who he leaned on quite a bit when it came to his crazy ideas. Though Edison is the name one thinks of with this creation, he was not the first or only one to try to invent this technology. Many European inventors took a swing at it first, even getting confident enough to have patents made on their designs. With that confidence though, came disappointment as each of their ideas were rejected. When Edison was successful he continued to create new technologies with Dickson, but never got a patent on them. This led to many copies being made of each of these inventions. None were entirely the same, but close enough that other inventors found themselves just building off of his original ideas.
One of Edison and Dicksons’ very first inventions was called the Kinetograph, created in 1890. This was their first attempt at a motion picture camera. Two years later is when they invented the kinetoscope. This was a device that acted as a projector of moving images on a screen. The way that this technology worked was that there were images flashing across the screen from a roll of tape across the machine. The images were not entirely clear when it first came out, but it was remarkable what they were able to do.
With these inventions being the start of it all, look where we are now. A world where TV’s are old news. People use their laptops and smartphones to watch anything in the world in seconds without taking any amount of time to consider how this is possible and how incredible it truly is. There are so many upsides to the new technology of motion pictures. Whether it is the easy access to anything you want to watch at any time, the wide variety of genres to choose from, the different emotions people can take away from different cinematic experiences, and so much more. Having said this though, some of these upsides are also downsides of technologies today. Having these platforms at such an easy access point creates the illusion that it is okay to be disconnected from the world as long as you want to be. This easy access to any and all content has also made monitoring what people find out there very difficult. Additionally, there is a stereotype of people in these cinematic films or television shows that portray people in a light that is not always realistic. It has caused many people in this generation to try to grow up faster than they should be, almost missing out on their youth a bit. People see the technological improvements as improvements, and scientifically they are. Looking more closely at the psychological impacts though, it is hard to say if where we are today as a society is better off with these crazy inventions or if we would be a closer-knit, happier society if we were back to using kinetoscopes.
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