A World That Watches Itself
95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram per day. 300 million on Facebook. Over 400,000 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube. When tech companies announce their new phones they make sure to talk about their cameras. Phones are even starting to cut off parts of their screens or making sliding parts just to make sure not to take away the selfie camera. We live in a world constantly surrounded by cameras.
What does this all amount to? How has the world changed through all these lenses?
When we see a picture like the one above, we are seeing the world through the eyes of the photographer if only for a moment. When we watch a youtube video we see what the creator wanted us to see. With more and more content being made, and more and more social networks aggregating it all together, we are seeing the world through a perspective other than our own and we are seeing it more frequently than ever before. Arguably this provide humanity with a better sense of connectedness than any other point in history, yet the reality of the era of cameras says otherwise.
There are kids being encouraged by their parents to become big online influencers. There is an emptiness that many famous Instagrammers or Youtubers have openly admitted to. There is a crushing pressure to portray ourselves a certain way online and to seek attention. Yet all of this still pales in comparison to the “filter bubbles” that we have all found ourselves in. We see only the content we are already looking for, backed up by the algorithms that constantly seek to better match your feed with information you already agree with. We no longer are exposed to the greater world beyond our personal preferences if we don’t have the desire and effort to seek it out ourselves.
It probably won’t stay this way forever. This is an adjustment period, to learn how to handle this new world where our presence extends far beyond the four walls of our home, into a world that is constantly watching itself.
This new world brings forth an interesting idea. With millions of photos being added every day and thousands of hours of video, only a small fraction of that ever shows up on our screens, but it is this tiny slice is the window into something greater, the human consciousness. Go with it for a moment. Everyday huge amounts of things are being seen and captured by people all around the world, and through the channels we view them on certain content hits the right frequency and starts to spread. It goes viral. Then suddenly everyone is talking about this dress, that protest, or the song of the summer, and even if you didn’t see it yourself your friends, your family will know and talk about it. This potentially insignificant moment is launched past the threshold of awareness and becomes salient across much of humanity. It can entertain us, divide us, bring us together, yet regardless of the opinions it creates it is, more importantly, known.
I can’t help but wonder whether this is the basis of the mysterious thing we call consciousness. Each of our bodies is made up of trillions of cells, billions of neurons in our brain, and we take in a constant stream of information from our eyes, ears, and other senses. Yet we aren’t aware of everything that’s going on all the time. (I’ve went to wash my face and forgot I had my glasses on!) There is a famous psychology experiment linked below. Take a couple of minutes to watch the video.
Did you see it? Only about 50% of people see it, so half of the people don’t even notice (I failed the first time if you were wondering). We like to think of the brain as a camera, that we see everything in front of us, but the truth is we focus only on things that are worth seeing in the moment, the things that make it past the threshold of attention.
In a sense, the important things “go viral” in our brains after all of the unimportant things were filtered out. This isn’t so different than that upvote you gave to that video, or when we share links, retweet posts, and get that thing trending. It suddenly bubbles up above the ocean of content and reaches the front page.
The stuff that doesn’t get quite as popular, but has a consistent following, could be said to hover in the subconscious. They help us to form our opinions of the world and shape a model of it inside our heads. Then when the time comes to make an important decision, to have that ethical debate, to discuss that big event on the news, to vote for the next world leader, we bring out all of our competing perspectives to come to a conclusion.
Magicians know very well the limits of our attention, as well as the internal models we use to understand what we see, to construct illusions of things that seem impossible. As the world continues to watch itself and self-sort the things it find important, we are susceptible to trickery. We might start to believe that what we are seeing online is somehow real or important when there is really a magician somewhere pulling the strings on stage. They will post things as if they are the truth and recorded without deception when deception was the goal all along.
What a camera sees is no different than what our eyes see. They only serve to capture light and turn them into signals. How we interpret that information depends on a whole facet of things like our culture, our believes, and our memory to make sense of what’s going on. As more and more content gets uploaded every day, the world will need to be critical of what they are seeing and learn to interpret them. Just as it can be easy for a single person to be distracted and lose their train of thought, the world can also be distracted and led astray from what might be more important at any given time.
In a world that watches itself, it also needs to learn how to decide what is worth seeing and where the camera should be pointing. Make you wonder. How many cameras are pointed at a cat right now?
