STOP FILMING CONCERTS WITH YOUR SHAKY MOBILE PHONE — ARE YOU CONTRIBUTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE?

be like the girl in the middle, in the moment, enjoying the music - the visual and the vibe, need to tell your remote tribe? sure, take a short clip or a photo but enjoy it for the moment in your place more so! :)

what?! climate change? pFFFTT! come on. .. that’s a bit over the top mr humble, are you joking with my mind?

ok, so maybe that’s a bit heavy, but’s let’s just bring a bit of reality to the world shall we? i realise you are buzzing that you have a phone that can do high definition video recording but let’s be honest apart from streaming that live, archive it to be never seen again, sharing a stream of the same shot from thousands of others in the audience, what is our addition to filming moments like that? what are we capturing, poor quality distorted audio, shaky video in a ‘i was here moment’ - i get it, you want to consign that moment to history.

i’d like to suggest a few reasons for my argument, reasoning and some solutions that i would suggest would have just a good result and be able to store the moment and get on with the enjoyment of the moment in realise instead of one step removed by having that smartphone in front of you for any length of time.

just because we have cloud storage. ..

when i think of all these streams of video that are fundamentally the same but from different (slight) degrees of angles i get a bit worried, how much storage do we use, how many data centres are we building, how many are run from renewables and what size is the power and data demands on the planet, is it the right thing to be consuming in this manner without concern for our impact, does this reckless recording have any impact on the planet when we are storing gigabytes, petabytes and bigger bigger collections of content, that sits there on hard drives using power, sitting waiting for retrieval?

IT now 10 percent of world's electricity consumption, report finds <— and that was in 2013! - now we have even more people using the web, internet of things, home blockchain mining, it’s going up and up, just check out this link below to see some statistical yearbook 2017 - of course we are seeing a lot more renewables coming online, which makes me feel a little better! :)

World Power consumption | Electricity consumption | Enerdata

the official stream is a million times better…

when i see people live streaming from a phone, in a moving crowd with a blasting sound system i go all grumpy old man mode, maybe it’s an age, maybe when i was twenty i’d be doing the same, when did i suddenly start be concerned about how i create my own fun, why care about it? - well i guess because knowing that the live stream will be a MILLION times better production, incredible sound, i’d rather share that link with my friends and ask them to look out for me, take a sign, take a snapshot or a little sixty second video if i really wanna show that i’m there, taking part - i worry about all of these live streams and stored shaky videos, how often do we ACTUALLY look at them again, our phones memory full of junk! —- maybe we need to come up with a smart, suggestive camera roll utility to optimise clips we don’t watch, find better clips, similar time frame, i think their is some AI potential here! :)

i get it, you wanna show people you are there…

look, i get it why it happens, we wanna share the moment, we are excited, we have a camera that is amazing in our pocket that we can record and look back at, share with friends how incredible it was, i get it. it’s cool, it’s neat, it’s choice, we have choice in our pockets, little super computers to do our bidding, heck we are these big, huge almost decentralised audience members sharing multiple views of the crowd around us, massive data streams of indexable data, useful maybe during, after for digital forensics to help/assist against terrorism and similar things, even for event producers to see where the bottlenecks are. i don’t know maybe i’m missing something - kind feels like all that data is ineffective. my borg tendencies, my optimising inner core get the shudders over it! :)

consider the end user experience. …

if we are sharing it to say ‘i was here’ is it a good experience to share with our friends when the music is blown out and the video is shaky due to the crowd around, is the point that actually the realness transports the viewer? - maybe, i get that. it’s kinda cool but i’ve seen so many people on trains sharing videos with a uninterested friend because really that video could be any events, any place, they can’t REALLY feel what the energy was like, the highs and the lows of the buildup, they can an idea but we are subtracting, desensitising the event, if we continue to do that, and everything is extracted, formulated and linear, will anything ever feel edgy, expression, stored as a memory where you can recall how it felt?

do we need thousands of the same shot of a stage… .

not understanding fully the storage and power requirements of the video streams we have from that many cameras at an event but knowing that they are high definition size and the average size of those files (because i use them and edit them for youtube) i would expect them to be big amounts of data being stored. also transmitted, either life or pushing gigs and gigs of data across fibre lines into remote clouds and storage. i’d love to know from network engineers and storage consultants if it’s an easy thing to deploy, if scaling is a challenge or is excited or is stressful.

350 million GB stored & over 20 billion files recovered (and counting) is what https://www.backblaze.com alone says they are storing, i can’t even get my head around that - that’s just one cloud company, we have thousands of them let alone, corporates and small business networks and then the storage we have in our homes - we literally have data everywhere!

enjoy the moment through your 576 megapixel eyes not your 300dpi lcd screen. ..

So the megapixel equivalent numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image that would be required to show what the human eye could see when you view a scene. 90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels). 120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels

whoa, our eyes are able to see 576 megapixels that’s insane, we have digital cameras with 12/13/20+ megapixel cameras, small sensors, small lenses, yet we seem obsessed to capture that moment in a low quality way, or at least augment the experience into those low quality lenses for some kind of weird visual retrieval. seems crazy to use this content to trigger the real experience, especially if you are watching the stage through the screen you are missing the real visuals, the ones direct to cortex through those big big eyes of yours, store those images in wonderful hd inside of that fluid brain of yours, it’s the best data retrieval for now! :)

if you have too, less than sixty seconds is enough. .

ok, i’m not saying stop the fun, i’m saying, capture less, enjoy more, you are there in a crowd of other humans, gorge on the experience in a visual delight and allow all your senses to be consumed across all levels. make a creative video, capture a series of moments, keep the network data light by sending over a small file, it will have the same impact and who of your friends is watching longer than a minute anyway? the clip will have done it’s job i’m sure, a remote reference of the moment.

it could be argued that more streams is better for global cctv collection and information gathering thou.

as i got to the end of this i managed to actually offset the idea of all these live streams and recorded ‘same shots’ by flipping the script, using that usual mirror technique of the benefits. better data, retrieval of that content by government agencies that protect (or should be) and serve their citizens by keeping them safe, using AI to cross reference and index, solve location tracking requests, maybe find a kidnapped child or even body footage from police offices that are usual expected to protect and serve — i’m interested in the line and how we might have gone across it for the sake of intelligence over privacy.

245 million video surveillance cameras installed globally in 2014 — three years ago, 245 MILLION surveillance cameras, how many now, how steep has that grown and the data and power requirements to keep that going, is that something the planet has the capacity to keep up with? are we adding to the equation, are we damaging our very lives because of it? i’d love to hear your thoughts about this!

just a collection of thoughts.. .

of course, your life is your life, do you. just i’ve found myself so many times thinking this while watching the tv, remote festivals from the sofa and wondered why people are not enjoying the moment for themselves but are more interested to live it out watching through a screen. i hope this thought process get’s out there and people start to enjoy the moment more in their visual cortex! :)

much love! :)