Let me insert stuff in your posting to help make things clearer:


"I do not include film as art in my thesis, but film (both still and motion) that can be considered as primary source material. Let's call it archivable imagery."

What I mean is the medium, images of events as they happened on celluloid or tape. I don't mean "film" as the art form, such as making movies, television, &c.

"Second, for any event that happened prior to "The Present", any primary source material retrieved from the internet must likewise be considered polluted. The only material that retains any primacy is that previously recorded in some other form before the internet and held for interpretation directly from that pre-internet form...."

This is in reference to using the internet, or more specifically a website, as a source for reference material. We're on about the historian as a researcher, not the public as a consumer of his interpretation based on his research.

Film and photography aren't just about escapism/entertainment a swath of it deports itself as historical fact or primary source as you call it when it palpably isn't the case and this pre-dates the internet AI etc by a good margin so I would opine should be included as a source as equally polluted as some CGI/AI created guff and equally unreliable.

Wow, now I'm confused. Forget art and entertainment. It does not purport itself to be historically factual documentation. If it does, or if some moron says, "I saw it in an Indiana Jones film so its gotta be true!", its easy to show the bullshit card, as you did the films you mentioned.

Why must any primary source material culled from the net be termed polluted?

Simply because it is in an archive where it can be and often already is altered. A book of photos from WWII printed pre-internet is in a static final form. It cannot be altered once printed. Those same photographs archived on the net are in a dynamic environment. They can be altered at any time and are not subject to any archival custodianship. There is no finality in form.

If I view an original Hindenburg picture in wherever museum/collection it resides or watch an original 35mm filmed Churchillian speech ditto, why would watching that self same thing on say YouTube or social media automatically render it polluted if the content remains the same/unaltered? Surely both states can exist?

You answered your own question and I underlined where. You can compare the Youtube version to the original, because the latter exists. What you compared it to is primary, but the Youtube version is not, at least until that comparison is made to insure it isn't effed with. Even then, its only "good" for that moment since it can be altered at any time.

You cannot do the same to a post-internet event. Remember the message from the Pope about Trump's policies that Mike posted a while back? That's a great example, for it was completely faked. It was AI generated, and well done. The net is rife with it already, and already a professional historian has to suspect anything gleaned from the net as unreliable source material unless he can prove otherwise, item be item, and that proof must be good enough to withstand peer review.

Or have I misunderstood the premise?

Or I'm not very clear. GRIN!

I cannot find myself taking the default position that just because some historical event is/was web based it inhabits the De facto state of being "polluted" somehow.

Your argument seems to flow along the lines of If I show a genuine picture of my late father in Burma shaking hands with Mountbatten, (real event) during the last big show via the internet, then the veracity of said picture is now diminished due to the medium utilised rather than flying state-side and putting it your hands.

If you sent that photo directly to me over email, text, whatever, I can trust you as the source, thus lending credence to its "virginity". If I were to pull that photo off a website somewhere, then yes, it is suspect. It's that simple.

Worse, if I get a picture of an event from today, there is no "real" photo to compare it to so as to confirm that its unaltered, hence prove the event occurred as shown in the image.

I do omit from all of this anything created in the realm of AI. I have had several musical works brought to my attention which on the one hand I marvel at the accuracy of the instrumental and vocal renditions contained therein even to the point of believing that if released twenty or so years previously it would top any pop/jazz/rock charts easily.

However it doesn't define true human creativity as no human input other than pressing "ENTER" on the PC keyboard was involved, is formulaic in nature after much listening and I will mourn for the generation that thinks this easy option is the way to make a musical buck or a top ten hit from now on so in that regard I think we are in agreement

On that we are. The danger is much more than the death of humanity in its artistic expression, though. Because the internet is such an unreliable dynamic archive, one cannot believe anything retrieved from it as real unless one can compare it to some sort of primary material properly archived and properly vetted. AI is already capable of such manipulation in the world of the internet, there will be a date that begins the Post Historical Era, if that date hasn't already passed. It already is being used for the purpose, as Mike's vid proves. That video is now in the historical record; who will vet this shit?

People are using it to bring down nations, to take power, to alter the academic discipline of the historian. Like the archaeologists, there is a cutoff where further study is rendered worthless; for them it was nuclear and thermo-nuclear testing. For us it is the advent of the internet and its role in the recording of the human story.