What time is it?
There’s work and groceries and laundry and you have to clean up the place now and then. If, on top of that, you have kids, you are short about a day a week, so that the undone piles up like the undead in a horror film.
Then you spend time with your friends. Lots of it. More than you think, if you also keep uploading photos to Flickr and checking the ones your friends upload. Every time you get together, the cameras or at least the cell phones come out and every priceless second is documented. Then you twitter everyone who isn’t there. The photos get uploaded, categorized, tagged…
And now Viddler.
The positive take on all this is that it shows a powerful drive for community. These technologies can connect us and give us things in common, even when they’re silly. It’s fun. You get together, everyone takes pictures, and you can re-live the event right away. If this weren’t so fascinating Flickr wouldn’t have a gazillion photos posted. I Googled “why do we take photos?” and got too many answers to read, of course, but Melanie Colburn’s remark that “There is such a human need to record” hit home with me.
I think most of it really is just the attempt to communicate. There’s a narcissistic side to it all – we love our photos and videos – but primarily, we’re just reaching out.
The question that concerns me is whether we spend so much time with this stuff – it does take a lot of time – that we spend less time with each other in person, doing ordinary, real things, than we realize. But maybe not. Maybe we’re still doing everything we’d be doing without the cameras and the phones.
Just later.