Did the enthusiasm of the Romantics for the wind-harp signify that htey had come to see the history of the Western mind as a kind of war between the harp and the camera--that they foresaw the camera civilization that was coming upon us? If so, they were true prophets, because it certainly has come. The camera up to date has won that war. We live in a camera civilization. Our entertainment is camera entertainment. Our holidays are camera holidays....Our science is almost entirely a camera science....Our philosophers--it is no longer possible even to argue with most of them, because you cannot argue about an axiom, and it is already becoming self-evident to camera man that only camera words ahve any meaning. Even our poetry has become, for the most part, camera poetry. So much of it consists of those pointedly paradoxical surface contrasts between words and between random thoughts and feelings, arranged in the complicated perspective of the poet's own often rather meager personality. Were, one asks, has the music gone? Where has the wind gone that sweeps the music into being, the hagion pneuma, the ruach elohim? It really does feel as though the camera had won hands down and smashed the harp to pieces.
Owen Barfield, from The Rediscovery of Meaning, quoted in A Barfield Reader [University Press of New England. Hanover: 1999] pp. 54-55. Of course, Barfield isn't all negative when it comes to the camera -- i.e., to the apparent claim of objectivity that really arises from individualistic projection of a 'punctilinear nothingness' in the distance, the way a camera does, just has he is not all positive about the Romantic image of the aeolian harp. What he suggests is that the two need to be joined -- we should not merely look, we should not merely imagine, we should look with imagination.
