Technologically boring, trivially awesome
The incorrigible Merlin Mann posted on his tumblog a few days ago about using his Flip video camera to record “little moments” with his daughter Eleanor.
Take a moment and prepare for the cuteness of Eleanor below, and yes, I’m leading with the cute kid (if you don’t have your own, borrow):
As Merlin points out:
Say what you will about the (numerous) technical limitations of the Flip, but, in terms of catching the small, trivial stuff that ends up comprising the connective tissue of memories, it’s the real deal. 90% of the gold I get with the Flip would never have seemed “important enough” to shoot with my $1k HD camera — plus who carries a softball-sized video camera everywhere they go?
I, too, have both a Flip and an HD camera, but it’s the Flip I’ve thrown in my bag to travel with lately. Merlin frames the Flip as a way to catch personal, everyday moments, but I think we’re in a moment where the trivial wins because the trivial can travel.
The small, trivial stuff that is the memories? That’s Twitter too, and even though Twitter’s been a leaky garden hose lately that their staff steps on while fixing the faucet, we’re still crowding around like little kids, waiting our turn to drink (or forking the stream with our fingers to gulp it elsewhere).
Somewhat Related Aside That Really Belongs In a DFW-style Footnote:
In my work at PBS and Knight Foundation, my roles have and do include social media evangelism. I’m actually rather tired of trying to explain Twitter; my breakfast and the six impossible things I believe before it are interesting. And even those of us who twhirl with it own Fail Whale shirts and feed friends in other rooms.
Aside To the Aside That I’ve Needed To Vent For a Long Time:
Also, a belated general congratulatory note on your Facebook fan page. Facebook is only mostly dead (not all dead, though apps are going through your stuff and looking for loose change); maybe you saw the flames a few months back? A Beacon, I think it was.
To return to traveling and the question of the “good” camera (and that’s Merlin’s line, not mine), I’m not sure I’ll pull out the HD camera except when I’m at my magic cottage making a cooking vlog and feel like setting up a tripod; you need to see the seductive crevices of doughnuts fried in lard (and the upcoming mangos and seared scallops) in high resolution. But when I’m with you, and we’re grilling and I want you to explain the weird, unripened figs on the tree in your backyard:
or I want to record the way it feels to sit at a picnic table in a neighborhood restaurant in Somerville, MA without alarming the server and other diners?
I’m reaching for the Flip cam, and mostly because of the way non-geeks react to devices.
Rebecca MacKinnon, one of the founders of Global Voices (the group that held the intense and inspiring summit that I attended in Budapest recently) posted thoughts a few days ago about devices, generativity, and Clay Shirky‘s idea that “communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring,” which he proposes in his book Here Comes Everybody.
Rebecca points out that “only after digital citizen media tools become commonplace in such communities [she cites communities in developing areas where Rising Voices, a subset of Global Voices, has projects training new bloggers and videographers] will the most interesting social innovation really start to happen on a global scale.”
In this model, the user is (for reasons of cost and mainstream availability) a late adopter and/or a mainstream tech consumer, but maybe it’s not a time argument. Maybe it’s about embracing parameters.
When Knight Foundation gathered the winners of the News Challenge (a yearly contest to fund projects about the future of local news delivery) together a weeks ago at MIT, I ended up talking to News Challenge winner Lisa Williams about parameters.
Lisa freely admitted that she’s very into parameters, which is important coming from someone who founded a site of hyperlocal sites (if you haven’t seen Placeblogger, go now. We’ll wait.) If anyone has thought about how to share online the way it feels to live in a place, it’s Lisa.
What I’ve kept thinking about is how Lisa emphasized parameters are freeing. When Flickr first added video with a 1:30 length limitation, I thought it was a dumb move. I’m paying for this service, I thought. But now I get it.
In this attention economy, where the time and attention to invest reading an annoyingly long blog post is scarce (two days in a row, thank you), we still want what we call in the American South the “4 veg” plate. Small helpings of different good stuff.
That kind of content, device, interface, userflow is comfort food (and plenty filling for places where mobile credits are more valuable than currency). As Brian Oberkirch–who always helps us realize what we’re actually looking at–might say, there is joy here, whether we’re marveling at Eleanor’s first whathaveyous or the moment that a Bolivian activist captured during a street scuffle or at the dinner table.
So I don’t think we’re talking about the technologically boring. I think we’re talking about the thoughtfully simple enabling the trivially awesome in a world where we are all social hackers.
Up for doing some little shots of content? That seat next to you taken?
Related posts:
- you are awesome and beautiful
- and who will deliver the news tomorrow?
- kthread spins: november on repeat
Leave a Reply
Posted Tuesday, July 8th, 2008, 1:20 pm * Filed in Design, Video. * Tags: cam, eleanor, flip, kristen, kthread, mann, merlin, taylor. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
kthread caught me on cam consuming kobe meatballs, pork belly and watermelon martinis. our darkened haunt might have kept the feast from appearing here, but i assure her readers its extravagance was catching and worth catching.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Just made it public on Flickr here, Ben.
Always lovely to have dinner with you—particularly as we courted decadence with every order—
July 8th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I’ve heard several times recently the idea that limitations breed creativity. But I have to gently disagree that these ‘content shots’ are gold or awesome, unless maybe you know the people in them. Similarly, I lost interest in Twitter because there is a certain potency in savoring the moments I used to “tweet” and letting them gestate before sharing them in some sort of artistic form. When every private moment and impulse is shared they become less meaningful to me, somehow, not more. Maybe *that* is the limit that I prefer – the holding back, first, before sharing. Very thought-provoking post!
July 8th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Amanda: Are gestation and sharing mutually exclusive? I think I do both. And quite frequently I don’t share that I’m twittering with those around me. So, I end up savoring the surreptitiousness, not simply the content.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Ben: I think they are, for me. I can see how sharing could be a form of ‘gestation’ for some people – how you could twitter a bunch of observations and then weave them into an essay, for example. But for me, instead of feeling an incremental buildup towards something bigger, I end up feeling spent. It’s like I need to conserve my expressive energy, if that makes any sense.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Thanks, Amanda and Ben; it’s fun to see two artists and scholars (and foodies!) thinking through this here.
Amanda, I was talking to someone in D.C. this weekend about a moment I had when she interrupted me to say, “oh, right, I remember that tweet.” So I understand the need to reserve and work through some things before sharing (and I know you draw on lived experiences in your improv work).
I am remembering, though, a little bit of video you included a few months back about a tree, I think, at a gallery? It added so much for me, and I’m glad you included it to enrich the blog post (which may have taken a while to post).
I hadn’t posted the brief video of my dinner with Ben on Saturday night before his comment above. There should be less me, more Ben, more pork belly–but it is what it is, and I was glad to share it.
I’ve tagged it so that we can remember how much fun it was to order the delicious kobe meatballs, the toro, the watermelon drink and sake—and who knows if someone else will find it and decide to eat at Ten? If we’ll look back, if, say, the restaurant closes in a few years (it happens) and be glad for this brief bit of video.
Ben, I’m all for surreptitiousness. And serendipity.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Amanda: I’ll add only that the act of twittering, a kind of temporal suspension, is a way of savoring, of refusing to let the moment pass–both then and there but also for others who would otherwise, as Kristen points out, miss it or at least its exciting immediacy.
Kristen: That takes me back to the Serendipity iced hot chocolate–and to superfoods, and to the many nutritional fads to which I’ve hitched my sail. Btw, I forgot to show you my new Superfood powder complete with mushroom extracts. More soon.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:11 am
As somebody who sees himself as pretty web savvy – yes, we Australians do enjoy the vices of the www – the thoughts above make me wonder if I need to get my shit together. Finding connections between the West and the rest is, for me at least, one of the key challenges of our age. Thus far, we ain’t doing too well, but blogging/translations are helping.
Oh, if/when I have kiddies, I suspect they’ll be filmed up the wazoo (aka too often to make them normal.)
July 10th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Ben, hmm, intrigued by (and skeptical of the deliciousness quotient of) that powder. I know you’ll find a way to incorporate it into a wonderful shake.
Antony, with your mad blogging skills, it is time to embrace video—if not for your country, for your active blog. I don’t fear for your theoretical children, but, you know, children are the future. Let’s teach them well (about video) and let them lead the way…