Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hi everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future and says, you came and you gave without taking, but I sent you away.
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Volcabama, I'm Joe McCormick, and uh, we are taking a break from our discussion about superhero movies True Story to have a podcast about really kind of broadcasting our lives and the fact that this is kind of a thing and it has been a thing
for a while. Yeah. In our last podcast, we talked about surveillance, about how surveillance has been escalating in a very rapid way for the past few decades um and how that trend is probably going to continue, how we should feel about it and what it's going to mean. But we should keep in mind that a lot of the recording that's going on is not some government or even some business with the CCTV camera capturing you without
you knowing. Yeah, it's your buddy with the smartphone or the webcam with a webcam, or your smartphone or your Google glass. Yeah, we call this a sue veillance as opposed to surveillance. Right, it's not a joke, was true, sue. Veillance it is the recording of an activity by someone who is actually participating in said activity. I mean, I'm learning words. This is great, this is actually huge. How many photos do people upload to Facebook every day? It's
like for a month. I think it's three hundred million. That's a lot of photos. And so then there's all the video. There's seventy two hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, according to the last update from YouTube, which was quite a while ago. It was a couple of years ago. It wasn't. No, no, it was several months ago, because a couple of years ago they said it was right, you're right, yeah, but still it's probably more since then. Oh sure, I bet we're I bet
we're creeping up to the hundred hours per minute. Uh you know, a hundred hours worth of video per minute passing pretty soon. Yeah that's yeah. Wait, wait, way more than any any one human person could possibly consume. It's like twelve years of footage per day. Yeah no, and it's it's accumulating so quickly there's no way for you
to be able to catch up. You would never just there's not enough hours unless you find some way to one make everybody stop and to achieve, if not immortality, incredible longevity for you to be able to go through and watch everything that's been on YouTube, and a lot of that is stuff that people have shot of themselves
that they want to share. They're either sharing their opinion about something or they're creating a an online journal that's in video form or a vlog as a lot of people like to call it, unless you're Felicia Day, in which case you call it a flog. Even even outside of that, there's there's Twitter updates, there's Facebook up day, It's all of this text that is going into this online uh giant world diary. Yeah. Sure, I think our last podcast maybe got a little bit darker than we
meant it to. Uh well, because we should a superhero discussion that we right need to get to, right, Okay, But what we should have remembered is that there's there's this irony, you know, like we want to be recorded. People are like, my privacy, you know, and that's real, that's not I'm not saying like the need for privacy doesn't exist, but at the same time, we have this not all of us. Most people have this irresistible urge
to get recorded and make a mark, to share. I mean a lot of I would say a great deal of human interaction is all in the sharing of stories. Those stories may not be formal stories that have a beginning, middle, and end and you know, a narrative structure that you could, you know, tear apart in a literature class, but they are stories. It could be a story what happened to you that morning. It could be something that reminds you of something else you you had seen but you know.
Or it could just be taking events and then framing it in such a way where it does form a narrative, where whereas someone who was independently observing that may just see a sequence of events that doesn't have any particular connection. But you, as because of your experience, you can create that connection and make it even more compelling. And then you have the desire, Hey, I just realized these connections between these seemingly disconnected events. I have to share this
with everybody because it's just cool. Well yeah, I mean people have been turning their lives into narratives for hundreds of years, I guess even thousands, right, pretty much. Well, how long have people been making diaries? Well, I mean, I would say cave paintings are probably technically sort of diary tacular. That's eaten by mammoth today. Good day for Ugu was fighting grog for a woman. That's that's typical journal entry. That story of Jonathan strictly Actually, that was
on my live journal. That was that was something I wrote three years ago. Actually. And an interesting historical point is that back before the late nineteenth century, really back before the twentieth century period, um diaries were a lot
less personal. It wasn't really until uh Freudian psychology, the popularization of the novel, and the profession of journalism that we really started to have this concrete sense of a personal identity and a personal self that deserved the kind of attention that we give it through these diaries and
and so. But before people would would get together, friends and family would get together and read each other's diaries as a way of sharing what was going on in their lives, which is kind of unheard of these days. I mean, diaries are supposed to be this very private, very personal thing right up until you start putting it on Twitter or live journal or etcetera. Raise your hand if you or a sibling had one of those diaries with a little lock on it, yea, or well, and
those things are so easy to pry apart. But Joe has been burned before. That's what we're trying to say. All you need is a crowbar and and a little bit of elbow grease and the desire to see it done. Uh. Yeah, So there is this this sort of for a lot of people, this desire to to record and to share their observations, the things that happened to them, really their
life story. And technology has given us more tools to do that now than we've ever had access to before, to the point where we're getting closer and closer to a time when we could have our entire lives documented from birth to death. Yeah, did people ever try to do this just in writing like a standard diary? How close could you get? The answer is yes, there there there are several people. Um it's called a obsessive obsessive
diary writing or obsessive diaryists. And uh, there's one terrific example of a of a Mr of a Reverend Robert Shields, who was a reverend teacher and Washington State wrote three to six thousand words per day for over twenty years, a total of thirty seven point five million words over the course of his lifetime. He had six typewriters arranged in a horseshoe around a swivel chair and would just sit down and and circulate amongst the typewriters until they
ran out of ribbon um. And this was I mean, he was recording things in five minute increments um that there was a terrific story in an NPR about it, and you know, things things like a twelve twelve twenty five I stripped to my thermals. I always do that. Twelve thirty to twelve fifty. I eight left over Sam and Alaska read salmon by Bumblebee about seven ounces, drank ten ounces of orange juice while I read the Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations. I could keep going spectacular. The fact that he always does that, Why did he did he only report it once or did he reported every day every day? Do you know? Now here's the question, though, do you know if he did this intentionally for public consumption or was he doing it just or his own reasons? He was doing it for his own private reasons. He um well, he was. He was born in nineteen eighteen.
His father happened to be a speed typing champion, UM who could type the Gettysburg address over and over at two and twenty two words per minute. That break in question Quarty keyboard or Dvorak or what I'm guessing it has to be Quarty if you're talking nineteen eighteen. Yeah, okay, sorry, I do not have personal data. To be fair, there were other keyboards early early on in the typewriters, just the Quarty one is the one that ended up catching on, right,
I'll look into it and get back to Yes. He he started a diary at the age of seventeen, but gave it up, lost interest in it, and then uh and then yeah, when he was I guess what, in his fifties or sixties. At some point he started this um, this obsessive diary. He he said that he didn't know why he was doing it, he just did and he just had to, and that the thought of stopping it
would be like turning off his life. Yeah. So, I don't know if y'all have ever kept a journal or a diary, but it's really interesting the way that writing down your experiences can help give them a sense of meaning. What was before just something that happened to you takes on a kind of symbolic or narrative significance when you put put it to words, and and historically speaking, even very mundane accounts like these could be very interesting, you know.
I mean, I mean, they're they're they're pretty boring to read them right now, But in two hundred years and four hundred years, that material is gold because we have so little information about what was going on at that time aside from these written diaries. Oh yeah, that's totally true.
I mean if we just had access to a few totally mundane records of daily life from say ancient Sumeria, I mean, how fascinating would that be now, right right, especially people that were involved in large world changing events and in wars and politics, and in in spectacular events and disasters. I'm just thinking, it's been a quiet week in ancient sumer my homeland, s Sumeia if he's Samaria. But I'm going with the prey home companion approach. Oh
I see secular thing? No, yeah, I get it? Or or would it be you know, just as someone sitting there, like like like this guy just going like, like I took some temperature readings across my house over the course of today. Would you like to hear all of them? The paper answers yes. And like I said, we we've developed technology now that really makes us even easier. Yeah.
One thing that occurred to me, and I'm sure there are people who are maybe art philosophers or somebody who commented on this, but it seems to me that by recording something you kind of imbue it with a significance in the same way that you did by putting it to words, by writing down your experiences. There's something magic that happens there. And it's similar when you take a picture or record it something, or even or even just live streaming where you're not recording it but you know
someone else is watching, which I can't. I'm not one of those people. I don't. I don't have of camera on me all the time. That's stream me my my mundane activities out to the internet. But as an actor, as someone who gets up on stage and performs in front of the audiences, live audiences, I mean part of
the reason why I do that. I'm not saying this is for all actors, but for my own personal reasons is that there's this sense of validation that comes from someone, Yeah, being reacting to something that you are doing and knowing that that reaction is affecting someone gives you that sort of sense of satisfaction and validation. I expect, I suspect rather that some of the people who are life casting get a similar kind of sense of validation from that.
So these days what is life casting involved. Well, before we get into what these days what it involves, we need to kind of talk about the beginning of what life casting was. Yeah, where did they come from and how did people How do people get to doing this? I would argue that it originally sort of got a shot in the arm back in nineteen seventy three, So this is pre web obviously by a couple of decades. Nineteen seventy three, that's when PBS premiered a show called
All an American Family. An American Family was a precursor to reality television. It followed the on PPS and it followed the life of an American family, and cameras were everywhere, and it was uh. There was some criticism that that it wasn't a perfectly natural kind of setting, which is the case whenever I think you put cameras and I mean, it's it's starting to get to the point where cameras
everywhere is natural. So I would argue that we're getting to a point where you could do a reality television show where the fact that cameras are there is not actually making it artificial. But now if you have a big crew there, who is standing there behind the cameras and monitors and saying that argument was great, but we missed the end. Could you do the same argument again,
that's not so natural. But anyway, well, there's also still be a difference I think between people who know they're being recorded and maybe a few people are watching versus people who know they're being recorded and they know a million b right right. If you know that you're doing it for an audience, then you're going to behave differently than you would otherwise. Really depends on what kind of psychopath you are, I think, because the kind of psychopath I am, I don't I don't change if it's if
it's one person watching or one million. I'm still psych That's why I'm an actor. Uh yeah. And then there were other movies that came out that like Real Life, which was a comedy that was spoofing this sort of stuff. Uh. There, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite movies of all time, which also kind of ties into this idea of reality reality show and turning your life into a type of entertainment for other people. That film would be Shock Treatment, which is the spiritual sequel to Rocky
Horror Picture Show. It involves several of the characters. Brad and Janet are the two main characters in Shock Treatment. Uh. Interesting little side note, there's only one actor in both Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment who is playing the same character. That's your dough Brian No. Richard O'Brien is in both movies, but he's not playing the same character. He's riff raff in uh in Rocky Horror, and he's McKinley in Shock Treatment. Though the only actor who plays the same character, I
don't even know the actor's name. I know the character's name is Ralph Hapschatt, who in Rocky Horror is the
guy who's getting married. At the very beginning of the movie, Brad and jenetor are going to a wedding, and the wedding is between Betty Monroe and Ralph hap chat and the actor who played Ralph is the same guy in both movies, and he plays Ralph, and yeah, well, the the thing about Shock Treatment is that it all takes place in Denton, and Denton is a town that's just a giant television studio, and so there's a studio audience
that's watching everything that happens. And so the lives of Brad and Janet as they play out in the movie are being observed by a live studio audience that's reacting to the stuff that's going on during the course of the film. So it's this kind of idea. And again this is before any real reality shows that come out the sides of the PBS uh experiment that had come
out in seventy three. Uh, And this is the kind of stuff that started to get people into thinking, hey, how could we you know, use this and make an entertainment out of it. Meanwhile, Uh, once we get into the nineties, you get into the rise of the Internet in the world Wide Web. Now, the Internet had been around for a while, but the Worldwide Web is what
made it really accessible to the average person. On top of that, we started seeing things like digital cameras and when digital cameras became more and more common, and then we could get into the point where we had webcams that could take a picture every you know, minute or
three minutes or whatever and then upload it. Because back then the broadband speeds were such that unless you were at a university and had a dedicated line, uh, you didn't really have the speed the throughput necessary to upload digital streaming video. You can also, no one would have
had this speed to download it. I had to watch it. Yeah, So the early earliest lifecasting was really just a bunch of webcams that were um position around various people's homes that would take a photo every few minutes and then upload it. And so you would go to the person's website and then refresh the page, or the page with itself would refresh every few minutes and give you an updated view of what had happened in the the um
in that person's home. Now, this kind of stuff was sort of mentioned in a novel that was written by a pretty famous science fiction author, William Gibson neuromancer fame. So Gibson had talked about a concept called God's Little Toys, and he took that actually from something that our friend of william S Burrows said about a real to reel tape machine, the idea that this is God's little Toys. It's something that you could record thoughts and in playback
whenever you wanted. But in his his novel All Tomorrow's Parties, God's Little Toys were these blimps that could follow a person around and stream everything so that it was con stantly broadcasting that person's life and became a record of that person's life as they moved around. Uh So that kind of idea filtered into reality once we get into
the nineties and we start with these webcams. Some of the earliest people who some of the people who did this first, this this idea of life casting, of broadcasting their lives include uh Jennifer Ringley who started Jenny Cam. So Jenny Cam went from about two four and she had cameras up and would upload it was was uploading pictures of her life every single day. She did her
best to have it running all the time. Uh. Steve Mann was another early life caster and then by n SO nine four nine six is when we start seeing lifecasting get started. Ninety nine that's when it really started to hit the public consciousness, this idea of people's lives being broadcast for entertainment, because that is when in the Netherlands a television show called Big Brother hit there, and Big Brother, you know, it was all about throwing people together.
It's kind of like Real World that MTV had done in the way, but it was it was throwing a bunch of people together and seeing what happens, kind of like just starting an ant farm, but with people and then shaking it really good, just before the cameras start rolling picking really controversial ants fight exactly. Yeah, and and yeah, in a little bit more of a contained area than in the real world, right, And and there are people out there who still do quite a bit of streaming.
Some of them are life casting with wearable computers, are wearable UM cameras, where it's more about capturing their point of view as opposed to the camera being turned back on themselves. It's more about them capturing everything that's happening to them from their perspective, which is the concept of Google Glass. Well, that's one thing Google glass is capable of doing. Yeah, And if I can interject, I think
that's sort of the future trend. I think that's where this is going, is not so much turning the camera on yourself for the I think I see it. I see it as sort of red from your point of view. I think you're gonna have both because I think that
vlogging is still very much a thing. There are people who feel that they have uh, something very specific to say about various topics, and so they want to turn that camera back on themselves and record themselves saying, you know, why we should leave Brittany alone or whatever, right, And then there are going to be the other folks who are thinking, uh, you know, I just want the world to kind of see what it's like to go through life in my shoes. So I think we're gonna get
both types. Still, I don't I don't see one dominating over the other. I do see that the perspective stuff is going to jump in popularity simply because the technology is going to make it easier to do it well. And I'd also like to make a very important distinction between the future of life casting people uh taping everything that happens in broad casting it versus just plane recording
just personal her personally. I mean you said that shields the diarist like he didn't necessarily plan to publish this right right in fact, and let me scroll to find maybe he actually he UM He donated all of his diaries to Washington Washington State University. This was posthumously and um under under the agreement that it would not be read or subjected to a word count for fifty years. Wow. Huh,
But I mean, well, that's interesting. I mean so, so I think that tells us something that we sort of knew already is that there's clearly some personal value that people could get out of recording their experiences even without broadcasting them out to the world. And those seem like
two very different ways of approaching recording one's life. Absolutely, and there there's been a whole bunch of scientific research lately about UM about in in in health tracking, fitness tracking, just making yourself aware of your habits and aware of what you're doing. In psychology as well, people who who are working through issues and keep a diary about it end up having much better UM or maybe it's significantly
better at anyway results at the end. Yeah. Yeah, the idea that that it's we we talk about this a
lot as well. With the reliance upon the internet to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us these days, things like we don't have to remember as many facts as we used to because we've put that into our phones or on our computers and uh, but when you write it down, you're actively thinking about it as you're writing it, and then you have that personal record of it, not just you know, not just a Wikipedia entry that tells you about whatever the thing was that you were
thinking about. Has your own personal perspective on there. I think that really does. Even if it's just a ritual type thing, it really does have a way of cementing that and making it have more of a psychological significance in your life. Um. You know, I'm not a big journal keeper. I never have been, but I've I've used them before to write down funny things that I've thought about or observed, but not so much of my deepest
thoughts and feelings about stuff. I just have never been that kind of Your experiences are washed away like tears in rain. Well, it's probably for the best, you know. I mean, I destroy everything I touched, Joe, and uh, I don't want to look back at a wake of destruction. I just don't. Well, I've seen attack chips on fire. I've seen what seabeams glittering san hazard, gay little blade runner. Yeah,
I like how Yeah, well no, let me grab it here. Um. I I have sometimes kept journals on and off throughout my life, not a whole lot recently, um, but there have been times when I did, and it definitely it changes the way you live when you're when you're keeping records of things. I mean by down a memory, you
take an experience and you make it knowledge. Um. Like we were saying before, you kind of you imbue it with symbolic meaning just by putting it towards You do the same thing by recording it, you know, whether audio or video. But what about you, Lauren? Um? I I actually kept diaries daily as a child. I mean dozens and dozens of these diaries, and they were lost a few years ago when when my father moved and he was sending me, mailing me all of my possessions from
from my childhood. They were lost in the mail. And this is still this shattering thing to me because because I was writing down all of these deeply personal things that I always thought that I would have a written record of, and suddenly I don't, um, what creep has them now that too. But and then for a long time I did have a live journal, and so that was kind of an extension of that. Um but uh, but yeah, no, not not so much. Lately, I've kind
of given up on it. It's it's mostly I mean, sometimes I'll go back and look through my text messages to my friends if I want to see what was going on at a particular time or or yeah, or I'll scroll through Facebook and see what was going on. Yeah, I've done that too. Um. Yeah, when I go back and read my old I had a live journal too, I didn't just a lot of weeping, not a lot of weeping. I actually read it over and I think,
I don't even remember being this person anymore. It's it's almost like there there are times where I read things that I've written that were funny, and I think, man, I was really funny back then. What happened to I do that all the time. I have zero recollection of writing these things. I mean, I remember feeling the way that I was feeling at the time, but the actual words that happened, I have no idea. Oh yeah, I've
felt the same way. Um. It's amazing to me to think of though, I mean, if we were to make that more total, like imagine you are really recording your whole life and not necessarily broadcasting it, but just for your own purposes. I think I just can't imagine. And really, I mean, how different would life be if you had a record of everything. Imagine you had something like Google Glass and you could just set it to record constantly and so every conversation you had, everything you did, everything
was available to you totally on on recall. You just had to go back, rewind and find it and and even from the point you know, but but before you put on those that that Google glass and you start recording, Um, you know, I wonder what's going to happen with children who have been born in the past five years of of of digital photography, because you know, I mean, are I'm sure that all of us here have friends who have just ten billion pictures of their very adorable, precious
children on the internet. And you know, what's what's it going to be like? You know, we we all have a few tattered black and white photos or maybe not black and white, but you know, terrible chroma color from our childhoods. And these these kids are going to have this second to second documentation. I just have wood carvings. But just imagine, let's project it out for a few years. And just mentioned that you are able to to record pretty much your entire life and store it. I mean,
it's not that hard to imagine. It doesn't seem infeasible at all. And you can just imagine taking your kids and saying, hey, I want to show you this, and you show your kids the moment that you and your spouse met and say this is this is it. This is when we met one another and everything was magical. You could essentially, yeah, you could essentially recreate how I met your mother, but you know, in real life, uh, and and show them like, this is this is why
we got married. Well, so many of the most important moments in our lives are totally unpredictable and spontaneous. Sure, you don't have time to turn on a camera exactly, or if you did turn on a camera, you would have missed out on what it was that was happened. It would have been weird. If you're like, getting let
me document this now. I mean, having just an ambient recording gives you the ability to um to experience life and not worry about trying to capture it, but knowing that if something happens that you want to remember, it will be available to you, which is a big criticism of the of the kind of life blogging or life
capture that's happening right now, and that you know. I mean, how many times have you come to a concert and you see more people watching it through their cell phone than actually watching the stage, and and it kills you a little bit inside. You go like you're missing the experience.
That's also one of the reasons why Google was very interested in Google Glass, because they hope that it would bring you that much closer to just experiencing what's going on around you in real time, while also capturing everything from your point of view. But you don't have to worry about it because it's just doing it on its own well once once you tell it to record, it's not like it's always recording, although that is a fear
some people have. I think there is an interesting psychological distinction between, um, between having an experience and making memories of that experience, Like they're two different modes you get into right sure, um, but this this sort of consolidates them, right Yeah, And and I tell you. Let me. Let me tell you what I'm most looking forward to and
the few future with this kind of technology. What I'm most looking forward to is the fact that when my wife tells me I said something, and I know I didn't say that, but she tells me I said that, we can actually go back and look at the right. I am never wrong. I am never wrong, and in the video will prove it once we have that technology. She remembers things that happened in an alternate universe asitive. Well, I can't wait to see how this pans out. Yeah,
I can't be either. Well, guys, I think this wraps up our conversation about life casting. If you have any suggestions for topics that we should cover here on Forward Thinking, please get in touch with us. Let us know what you think. Tell us what you're excites you about the future. What is it that you really want to hear us talk about we can You can get in touch with us using our email. We have FW thinking at Discovery dot com that works to get to all three of us.
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