One of the interesting effects of media saturation is the dramatic growth in video aesthetics. We’re quick to separate the gifted eye from the amateurish, the well-made from the cheaply-produced. Consider music videos from twenty years ago; were most to have been made today they’d be dismissed. This is not simply because tastes have changed, but because our aesthetic apparatus has exploded.

It’s not total, though. Creative output still branches into the composed, where these aesthetic parameters apply, and the real(ish), where such parameters disrupt our belief in the legitimacy of the event. But at some point the former will swallow the latter, and even charming kitten videos will be scoffed at, so long as the lighting’s poor.