[TSUBASA] RETROSPECT之Issue7 by Brain78

Brian78UID: 2604416

ISSUE7 - "The video camera provides such an accurate and convincing record of contemporary life that it has become a more important form of documentation than written records."

I can't deny that because of the development of technology and the improvement of our life level, video cameras have come into more and more families and have been playing an important role on recording things in our daily lives. But the speaker seems to have overstated the influence it has brought to us and in my opinion ,it has not replaced and will
never replace the written words.


Admittedly, the video camera can provide a more accurate and convincing record as the speaker mentions. It brings us something that the written ones can never do , such as the spatial and temporal feelings of what happened. It shows us the main points in a vivid, intuitionistic and expressive way while the written records are often boring and not easy to seize the points. It can also capture the fleeting exciting moments in a quick way and let the others become the witness of those moments
such as the wondrously fierce 100-metre final or the seventh game of the NBA finals.
Besides, the video camera can spare one's time and energy of doing a large amount of work to finish the writing and the video storage format is more efficient as is much easier to be found out. What's more, video cameras can also be used as security and investigation equipments such an surveillance camera and so on. Using video cameras to report calamities such as floods, tsunami and earthquakes will call more convulsion and common views. For example, during the period of the Wenchuan Earthquake, it has been exactly the video camera lens that aroused the tears and pity of the whole society and encouraged them to give a hand to the sufferers. The video camera records can be so unfeigned and touching.


Nevertheless, the function and status of the written records can not be easily replaced. The written words still hold their unique charm for the following reasons. To begin with, the written words spare a large room for one's imagination and this mode should be more used when it comes to expressing one's subjective emotions while the video records often emphasize the objective alternatives. Besides, maybe since the video records is obtained too effortlessly, they seem to lack the deep or abstract meanings and too superficial not as the written ones which contain a lot of connotations. Moreover, the video camera can only record the things happened in the certain moment and the certain place while the writing can record things happened in a much broader time range. For example, we can learn what happened hundreds of years ago by reading the written records of historical data. Not only for the present, the writing can even recall the past and drop out the future. Furthermore, video cameras can not record statistics and quantitative ones which can only be recorded by written words, either. In addition, video can not provide a reliable formal documentation which is why contracts, agreement and juristic documents always use written records.


As I mentioned above, the written records can not totally be replaced by the video camera records, at least to some extent. I believe as time goes on and our people become richer and richer, the video camera will play a more and more important role in recording things, but written records will never disappear. It's up to the concrete situation and one's particular interest to choose the better way of recording things.