Let’s start with numbers. In February 2014 the WhatsApp users exchanged approximately 600 million images in a month. The same month, two years later, the exchanged images have become 1.600 million, exactly a BILLION more. Over the same period, the video messages have increased from 100 million to 250 million (according to Statistics).
YouTube, the multimedia storage of knowledge, this year receives every second approximately 300 hours of video. The proportion between the actual time and the stored digital time is 1 to more than one million (according to Brandwatch).
We store a million copies of each second we live on this planet.
On Facebook are used every day 100 million hours of video (according to Techcrunch), and still talking of Facebook we find equally important the statistics on the number of images uploads (loadings), even if uncertain, they vary depending on the source, between 300 million and 80 million photo uploads per day; an extraordinary number, no doubt!
Without considering Instagram, the social network based on images and video sharing, that in February 2013 had approximately 100 million active users and today, no more than three years later has 500 million active users on a monthly bases (according to Statista).
Millions of cyberusers post photos (or videos) on the Internet with events or facts that have characterized their day.
In the last decade we have created a limitless digital space where anyone can position images, videos and audios. Server after server, disk after disk, rack after rack we are building a “Multimedia World”.
The smartphones are the access keys to this new world. The phone is not just for calling; it offers multiple services, online services, first of all the possibility to make videos, to take pictures and to share them immediately.
The purchase of a smartphone cannot be separated from the camera’s quality, a crucial factor in accordance with the video’s dimensions and resolution.
Our relation with our smartphone and internet is more and more symbiotic and multimedia.
The way we deal with an event has changed for most of us, not only for the youngest ones; we live it, but more and more often we try to record it and share it. We are constantly looking for consent.
In the 21st century, every day all of us live a significant media exposure. This exposure, in the recent past, concerned only public figures and celebrities. Now has generated the need to be popular, appreciated, mentioned by our real or virtual community.
More and more often the personal success goes hand in hand with the popularity gained online, popularity which brings with it the obligation to expose oneself in a multi-media way; by means of videos, photos, audio messages. We examine all that surrounds us from a new perspective while we live the moment we consider it with a view to sharing it with our friends and followers, depending on our popularity.
We post what we do and sometimes we do it only to post it.
Events sharing, facts and news sharing have excessively increased, and that is good for most of the times… The press reports have reconsidered a new way of communication, real-time, ever more based on the multimedia material made by common people.
The multimedia information, limitless and fast comes more and more from the plain folks.
As every big change which involves the whole of society, the “Multimedia World” brings also huge negative consequences.
The ability to live the real world to the fullest, uninterruptedly, using all our senses, is losing ground, influenced by the obligation and the urge of sharing right away, of being popular, of keeping truck, memorizing and offering.
But it could be worse!
The recent debate on the relation between the terrorism actions and insane violence and the offenders’ need to gain popularity on a global scale is more than appropriate. Looking for popularity is a viral phenomenon that involves all, including unstable minds and terrorists. The echo owed to the news and the pain felt after a tragic event is the arrival point of an insane project of multimedia exposure in search of a stage to exhibit. Looking for the multimedia popularity through pain represents, unfortunately, the true lowest common denominator of the dramatic events of recent months.
Back to us and our conclusions! “The Multimedia World” distracts us and often the real image reaches our gaze through a lens, through our smartphone’s video and not directly. At the same time we communicate more and more, via web, with more and more people preferring to share images and videos rather than texts; immediate material to get, exhaustive, of high-definition or resolution.
We are the video-makers of our lives.
We are more and more what we share.
We are more and more multimedia!
WorldTwoDotZero
WorldTwoDotZero 