04/18/2011 07:10:13 AM 
Take a look at the above clip, it's Arcade Fire playing Cochella and the thing that you are immediately struck by is just how many in the audience are using their mobiles to video the event.
This is nothing new, it's been going on for years and The Beastie Boys even used their crowd sourced content to create a video.
However, there's something going on here that might be a little more significant than first appears.
When this technology improves, which it clearly is already, Flip is shutting down- Cisco seemingly given up the fight and realizing video technology is just going to end up in our mobile phones. The quality of this stuff is just going to get better and better and the tools to edit, share, process, etc are going to get better too.
We will end up being film directors of our own lives- it's not too hard to imagine future applications having certain film director filters or Director of Photography filters. It's going to be very easy to get very good stuff.
There are going to be obvious moments that we want to capture like concerts and special life events, but it's not impossible to think that we could have "always on" cameras that pick up everything that happens in our lives and records it to the giant hard drive in the cloud.
Clearly, we want it because we want to share it with others- and show them where we are and what we are up to. We will be able to connect much more richly through these video experiences- maybe we will invite others to attend and watch in real time.
When you think back to the concert- you start to see some of the issues with multi-tasking; of course we can do it- but there's something that changes in our relationship to the event or performance. We are not 100% focused on it, we have some of our attention on the "capture".
When we are pre-occupied with capturing it calls into question some motives and some other issues.
Are we going to want to "stage" things to make ourselves and our lives look better to others?
Will our obsession with capture mean that we miss out on the social interaction that creates the memories in the first place?
Posted by Ed Cotton
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