Media, Hot and Cool, Episode IV - Terms High and Low Definition

While we have already determined that "hot & cool" - in this pair and application - stem from talking, writing and argueing about afroamerican jazz music, we still have to look at the terms of high and low definition as well as those of participation and completion.

Obviously our Professor McLuhan, like any academic maverick, would naturally feel the urgent need to back up his "probes" by binding them down to the imaginary worlds of the more respected natural and social sciences by using such terms (definition, participation, completion, ...) to provide the rational reasoning, so coveted by academia since the old Greeks, influenced by writing vowels, getting too much sun and too much spear training, invented it.

First, about definition

Being lazy guys here in Jamaica and most of the time, for easy questions we just ask the n° 1 mainstream public wisdom collection:

Historically, the term high-definition television was first used to refer to television standards developed in the 1930s to replace early experimental systems with as few as 12 lines. Not long afterwards John Logie Baird, Philo T. Farnsworth, and Vladimir Zworykin had each developed competing TV systems, but resolution was not the issue that separated their substantially different technologies, it was patent interference lawsuits and deployment issues given the tumultuous financial climate of the late '20s and '30s.

The British 405-line system was the first to advertise itself as high definition and see widespread use. Most patents were expiring by the end of World War II leaving the market wide open and no worldwide standard for television agreed upon. The standards introduced in the early 1950s stayed for over half a century.

Now, if we believe this jedi archive and compare this to the tight binding and high popularity the concepts of high and low definitions have with television, at least provisionally we can take that description for granted. Taking into account how badly both HD audio and HD radio flopped, still inclines us further towards persuasion that the opposition of HD/LD ought to be applied to TV, mainly. LD of course is called SD in our positive times, unless you like to be a history buff and still want to call 12 lines television LD and think that PAL, NTSC and SECAM provide wholly statisfactory standards.

We would still have to mention that the original French system offered a black and white 819 lines system from 1949 to 1984 which probably gave rise to ideas of HD definition, having 12.5% more vertical resolution than modernday 720p HDTV.

A good 35mm negative has a vertical resolution of up to 3000 lines while NTSC in NA has one of 525 lines - theoretically. We so constate that Mr. McLuhan was entitled to relatively oppose TV and film as low and high def.

We will look at the concept of single channel fill-up and the task of applying this very discrimination to text, audio and other media as well as to comparing different media to each other in a minute - or so.