and every competing version of short-form video as seen on Facebook, Instagram, etc.
When people filmed, or shared, "home videos" in the days of VHS or camcorders, they were special occasions. It was a notable thing to do, taking a camera out and recording something. Even if the subject of the filming wasn't a special occasion (like filming a mundane breakfast), it instantly became a special occasion anyway because of the presence of the large and unusual camera.
Video-sharing platforms like Youtube changed the world forever by allowing everyone, around the world, to share video footage with each other easily. It also created a sort of "medium size" video art form that wasn't quite a film or TV show, but wasn't quite a short clip. People made Youtube videos that were sort of "medium" in length and also "medium" in effort and specialness. Sitting down at a desktop computer in the 2000s to watch a Youtube video, however, was still a very specific activity that you elected to do, watching something that was very clearly filmed for a specific purpose. It changed the world, but it didn't unsettle me.
When Twitter became popular, the concept of "micro-blogging" forever changed the written word on the internet, in my opinion. The magic trick of Twitter is that I can pretty much directly share my stream of consciousness into tweets, and they can go directly into your eyeballs and into your brain. My thoughts, as instantly as I can think them, can be shared directly into your thoughts, instantly. I think we take for granted how powerful, and scary, that ability is.
Tiktok-style short form video feels like the video version of those tweets. Because we all have smartphones, which have high-quality cameras in them, and the act of recording what we see is completely normalized, we've come so far away from the special act of "recording a home video on VHS." For all intents and purposes, the smartphone is incredibly close to just having a camera on your eyeballs, because we always have the smartphone on our person and it's not unusual to hold it up to our face. Therefore, even without wearing something like a "Google Glass", we all casually have the ability to record and share our eye's perspective at any time.
The part that bothers me is this:
There is a financial and attention incentive for people to make short-form video that gets a lot of Likes, comments, and shares. That means people constantly (and trust me, they do it constantly) are recording things from their actual lives: their interactions with loved ones, their children, their pets, their homes, their parents, their interactions with strangers...and posting them online in the hopes that they will be Liked, commented on, or shared. Some people are constructing whole careers, side-hustles, or hobbies out of making potential viral videos. This means that a lot of these videos are "fake" or "staged" or "exaggerated" to be funnier or more interesting.
Now, short-form video platforms are a complete mix of "real" moments of people's lives, recorded from their perspective, and "faked" moments of their lives, recorded from their perspective. Unlike television, film, and even Youtube, I feel like it is harder now to decipher which moments are genuine and which moments are faked in these videos. I see dozens and dozens of short-form videos a day of moments with people's families and children etc. where it is very unclear if the video was scripted/staged beforehand. And even when it is obvious, it still is deeply unsettling to me.
I wish that this incentive didn't exist for people to record things "from their lives", "from their eye's perspective", but to fake or embellish them in order to craft the perfect viral video. The way that it's recorded (the fact that it's in first person, it uses a smartphone, it's very casually filmed within their daily lives) makes the act more disturbing to me than it would be behind a camcorder or a TV camera. We also consume these types of videos by the dozen every day, their perspective being transmitted to us instantly just like tweets are.
anyway that's my ramble, thanks.
addendum: if the most optimistic beauty of a platform like Twitter is that we can share our thoughts to more easily connect and empathize with each other...then the most optimistic beauty of short-form smartphone video is the ability to let people see life from our perspective.
the fact that people instead use this to create fake "staged" moments from their perspective and trick us into thinking this is their life feels like a perversion of what this technology could be doing.
