Living in front of a camera

In a recent article I talked about how weird it was to hear music from singers or see actors in TV shows who were now dead.  I was watching another episode of Will and Grace when Will's nephew said "It's often very Valley Of The Dolls, oh, do you even get that reference?" to which Grace replies "Of course, it's from before you were even born" - this made me think about how old he actually was.  The episode in question, 'The Mourning Son' from Season 8, was filmed in 2006 and was the 4th last episode of the entire show.  The actor who played Jordan 'Jordie' Truman was Reed Alexander and he was 13 at the time.  He's now 23 years old but it made me think, you see him in the show as a kid and that will never change since the people in videos don't age - imagine if they did.

No the point I was making is that recordings, whether they be audio or visual, capture a moment, which no matter how hard anyone tries can never be returned to nor can it be relived.  You can recreate things, and indeed I've been told the BBC intends to make a new episode of 'Are You Being Served' which I spoke about in the above post.  I'm not sure how I feel about that right now as there hasn't been much detail on the plot or the setting i.e. time and place.  However hard you try to recreate these moments however you can never truly return to them.  While I look back on parts of my life and remember them, I never recorded the events.  It must be strange as a singer or an actor to be able to watch your life and revisit those moments.  I know that anyone can record their lives on a camera but beyond the obsession with selfies how many people take actual videos of their lives as opposed to photos?  Film is less forgiving than photos which you can filter and airbrush to your heart's content.  Adding that kind of touch-up to video is a lot harder to do and most people don't have the time.

This is where you need to draw the line and ask yourself how realistic you want your memories to be?  Nostalgia paints over the cracks in the paintings of our memories, we look back on our lives and we feel happier about our memories because the harshness of reality fades over time.  Video remains to be something many people avoid because it is not forgiving.  A video is as true as the day it was shot.  Now it has to be said there are a lot of people on Youtube who document their lives, and while I do admit this is true I am very sceptical about how accurate or true those depictions are.  I know for a fact several Youtubers who present the idea that it's "Just little old me here with my camera on my own doing all this work" when in reality they have a production team paid for by the talent network they are actually employed by; to that end there are also several Youtubers who openly admit they play a character on their main channels in vlogs they make on their second channels.  If you never saw the second channel you'd have no idea the first was actually scripted.

There are also a lot of people on Vine, and while I also admit that Vine has done a lot for the medium to make it popular and make people embrace it, I do have to point out the majority of people on Vine have comedy centred accounts.  Their content is intended to be funny and invariably that means the content is not true to life.  It is played out, acted, as convincing or unconvincing as it may be in doing so.

On the note of popularity, you also have to address the issue that Youtube has over 1 billion users all of whom have channels by default connected to their accounts whether they upload anything or not.  In spite of this 1 billion figure, the number of Youtubers who actually have over 1 million subscribers is just 1,861 at time of writing, this includes a number of virtual channels which display feeds like #Music.  The number with over 10 million subscribers is just 48.  Those represent approximately 0.0002% and 0.000005% Youtube's userbase respectively.  So I don't think it's a reliable example of what can be considered true to life.  Especially since many of the 48 people with over 10 million subscribers are actually music, gaming, or corporate channels for TV Shows etc and not vlogs or attempts to record someone's life.  Of the 48 in the list I can only determine 5 that are actually vlogs.