Low-res, high quality

Low-quality content seems to be becoming increasingly popular in contemporary media. I’m talking about unpolished photos and videos and memes that intentionally make no sense. This is by no means a new idea and I’m not saying anything revolutionary. Picasso strove to learn to unlearn complex techniques and remove restrictions from his practice leading to some of his best work. A lot of our generation is trying to disregard and dismantle societal expectations created by ourselves and our recent predecessors in regards to social media. Very often I get an idea for a video that I want to make but I end up procrastinating it because I don’t have a good quality camera on me (I sold my camera to buy track-packing supplies lmao). Thinking like this leads to me abandoning so many ideas. Most of the time, I should just go ahead and use the camera on my phone. The content of the video is far more important than the resolution, and I can always go back and re-film something in higher quality if it seems necessary for a specific video. Not starting a task because you don’t think it will be high enough quality becomes a perpetual excuse for so many tasks in all aspects of life. Instagram is a good place to witness what I’m talking about. Typically Instagram is a relatively toxic place where people only post the best aspects of themselves and their lives. For a lot of people, Instagram is a platform for posting curated, edited, polished photos and videos. However, over the last year or so you can see more and more people posting photo dumps with random content from their camera rolls, with no editing, and seemingly more candid moments. Of course, there have always been people doing this, people that were always ‘too cool to care or whatever, but that’s beside the point. The point is that these posts that seem ‘too cool to care’ are now trending. I’m also not going to go into the obvious issue of people carefully curating photo dumps to seem candid when they are not. For the sake of this writing, people that are actually too cool to care, and people that are pretending to be too cool to care can be considered the same. Regardless, it seems that lower quality, less polished, and less curated images are gaining in popularity. Memes are another pretty clear example. Perhaps they just highlight the dysfunctional reality that Generation Z experiences. Here’s an example of a meme that used to be funny: Here’s an example of a more contemporary meme that is for some reason considered funny: I guess that fact that this makes no sense and has no basis for comedy is what makes many enjoy this type of content. I see our love for lower fidelity content as an acknowledgement of the absurdity and meaningless of so many things we as a society hold in high regard. Seeing such content made me realise that my iPhone camera was enough. I couldn’t care less about the Mona Lisa. I mean it genuinely when I say I’m more interested in the stickman you drew on a napkin that time in a restaurant when you were 9. Do you know what I mean? I think many do. This attitude of not having to make everything seem perfect, and striving for imperfection can be so beneficial to one's output as a creative. Perfection is a waste of time and energy. For example, it might take 100 units of work to get your task to 70% quality. But, often you end up using more than 100 units on top of that to try to get that last 30%. Yeah, once in a while that may be worth it, but I think that most of the time the energy spent going for that last 30 would’ve been better spent getting a different project to 70% and stopping at 70%. I’d rather have loads of projects that are good enough, than only a few that are close to perfect. I'd like to think that this website is a good example too, it's pretty much just bare Html and basic CSS without overthinking the design. That's not to say that the design won't be developed further, because it will be.