Day 310 - Videos Story

Videos Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

There was no point to it. Amber had no goal. She wasn’t monetizing anything or working on some grand art project. She just liked to record her daily events. She wasn’t doing it for her family or friends or for posterity. There was no website. No audience. No paying customers. Nothing like that at all. She just recorded her day and went about her business.

When Amber was younger she had a journal. She even had a second “secret” journal for her more intimate thoughts. She took pictures. She saved magazine articles. She made scrapbooks filled with notes and ticket stubs and a variety of other keepsakes. In one form or another, Amber had some type of documentation of nearly every day of her life from the age of thirteen to twenty-three. There were boxes full of her memories. She had no plan on what to do with all of it.

As Amber grew up she moved further away from the written word and embraced technologies. She had several cameras. She was always taking pictures and videos, often from several different angles. After moving away from her parents, she set three cameras up in her apartment and filmed her life around the clock using the traditional three-camera setup of sitcom television shows. Her life was hardly a sitcom. There was almost nothing in her life that resembled a piece of fiction, but entertainment value and lack of quality storylines didn’t stop her. She just kept filming. Still, she didn’t do anything with it. She didn’t edit it or present it to anyone or try to sell it. And she didn’t go back and watch any of it. That wasn’t the point.

Many people had asked her what the point was. “I don’t know,” she would answer. That answer really bothered people. They wanted to argue with her. They wanted a point. They wanted it to mean something. They wanted her to want it to mean something. She would film all of this, all of their reactions. No one ever made her change or stop filming or develop better answers. She didn’t want to give them better answers. Her answers were hers and hers alone.

Many of her friends and boyfriends wanted to have sex and film it. Amber would politely decline. It secretly amused her though. People were so predictable – give them a camera and within a minimal amount of discussion, most all of them would bring up sex. She didn’t know what that said about them or humanity. It was just a possible quirk. Sex, which could be had at any time, didn’t get better because it was filmed. Often it got worse. And yet it was seemingly taboo and risqué. She appreciated their desire to do it, just not the actual act. But she filmed their suggesting it. She made sure to record those reactions. Those reactions were better than any sex tape could be.

“Everybody records everything,” she told herself. She knew she was not alone in the documentation trends of humanity, even if she was a bit more obsessive and completest than the rest. “And then they share it.” That was the part she didn’t get – that motivation to have to broadcast everything. To her the privacy was instrumental. To her, that was what kept things real. Everyone else recorded things knowing full well they were going to show it off to the world. Reactions were faked. Moments were faked. Everything was a show. Everything was false. It was all a pseudo-representation of life, designed to make things out to be better than they really were. But not her videos. Her videos were real. They were actual life with actual moments. She just lived. She lived real life. They were authentic. She wasn’t posing for the camera or hamming things up to evoke a certain emotion or reaction. She was just living life. The cameras freed her to be her exact self and never have to worry if she was living for anyone else or chasing false idols. She knew she was her own person and her own personality. She had nothing to prove. She did however wonder what would happen once the cameras were turned off and whether or not she would be able to live any other way.