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Why is the world losing color?

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Re: Why is the world losing color?

#201

Post by izacus »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

It's not "losing" color. At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments. But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone…

Your conclusion is not supported by data, you basically made the periods thing up to confirm your own preference.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#202

Post by izacus »

crazygringo wrote: post #123
xboxnolifes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments. Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media…

The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough. The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing. Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell y…

So do you have actual own data to counter this?

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#203

Post by IshKebab »

yorwba wrote: post #134
xboxnolifes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments. Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media…

If you look closely, there's actually an increase of red, green, blue, etc. at the same time as the increase in black and white, and it's the brownish colors of undyed organic materials that are decreasing. (Or maybe they were originally dyed and the color faded over the last 200 years.) Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synth…

Yeah I'm pretty skeptical of that visualisation anyway. It sure looks like there's more grey scale, but that's because they've grouped it all at the top. If you actually look at the pixels in the below "white" a lot of them are very dark and unsaturated too.

I don't think it's really a meaningful visualization. They're trying to show something 2D in 1 dimension.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#204

Post by crazygringo »

troupo wrote: post #178
crazygringo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama, and then also a serious technical problem involving HDR device-side (which is a whole other story). But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal. However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime theme…

> The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge". https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... > I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's now permeated everything, so it's hard to not watch stuff, as it's everywhere, with few exceptions.

> It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge".

It is. The article you link even begins:

> So many TV shows and movies now

That's what I'm taking about. Those "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama.

You're not seeing it in comedies. You're not seeing it in reality shows. There are also plenty of dramas that don't have it, possibly a majority but I'm not sure.

It's not everywhere, contrary to what you say. It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#205

Post by IshKebab »

BLanen wrote: post #78
crazygringo wrote: post #3

It's not "losing" color. At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments. But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone…

> But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone. This is meaningless. "When many things are different, everything is the same". Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing. "000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because…

> Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not.

It's perfectly meaningful. When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#206

Post by taeric »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

It's not "losing" color. At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments. But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone…

I mean... ish? There is something to be said for a minimal styling, but there is clearly an aesthetic change to things. As an easy example, wallpaper used to be far more common, and was often far more busy than the neutral colors people insist on in homes nowadays. Not just more colorful, but with designs on them.

You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.

I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#207

Post by int_19h »

bowsamic wrote: post #54
roughly wrote: post #49

One interesting thread here is the long shadow of Greek and later Roman statuary and architecture on Western European self image - the marble statues, columns, and architecture of the Roman empire were taken as the origin story for Western culture - "we were an empire built on philosophers and artists, and look at the (gleaming white) purity of their works." It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white stat…

> the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are. I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture

With Romans, at least, the typical (and incorrect) popular narrative is that they were initially austere - and that period is when their civilization achieved its peak - and then became decadent and ruin followed.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#208

Post by keyringlight »

ryandrake wrote: post #87
JKCalhoun wrote: post #32

Wow, so much to rage about from the article. I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though). Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car…

Another thing that might also play a role is this styling trend of vehicles looking "meaner" and more and more aggressive. This was discussed[1] a bit on HN a while ago. Bright colors don't really match the "My vehicle is going to punch you in the face" styling (for cars and especially trucks) that has become popular. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32425520

Something I found myself paying attention to as I was getting tired of cars and looking towards training for a motorcycle is what colors stand out, not just high-visibility clothes but the vehicle too because you want to be seen. Once you've tuned your eyes into looking it's shocking how many riders are pure black when they're more vulnerable on the roads. It's an interesting exercise when you're walking around a city onto a new street with cars parked up to see how quickly you can count how many there are, I found it can be difficult to separate out cars with how common black is now, and the less common brighter colors really stand out.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#209

Post by roenxi »

IshKebab wrote: post #205
BLanen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone. This is meaningless. "When many things are different, everything is the same". Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing. "000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because…

> Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's perfectly meaningful. When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.

Sure you can. Red rose in a field of green for example. Human eyes evolved to see the colours the way they do precisely because they were working in a world where nearly everything is colourful and some things needed to stand out.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#210

Post by amarcheschi »

tracker1 wrote: post #146
amarcheschi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, visually exhausting is something that imho happens only if you find unpleasant the colors you're seeing. The wonderful island of Burano is something I would never get tired of, yet it's so colorful. I think that the visual exhaustion comes from the fact that the thing we see everyday are made to catch our attention and not to decorate. So ads, shits and giggles that don't really add to our experience but that c…

I don't hate the wall art in your example... it's not quite my taste, but it doesn't make me pull my hair out. If you look at something like the link below, I'd hate having to be anywhere near it. Busy patterns and mixes of color just feel like noise and give me (sometimes literally) a headache. https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/vintage-bathroom-makeover-p...

Ok, I don't like that mess too
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