“Life In a Day” Shows Mufasa Was Right
http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/about-the-production/
The Lion King, Mufasa, once explained to his son Simba, “We are all connected in this great circle of life.” His statement parallels the cliché ideal that such a global interconnectivity exists between each individual on the planet, and appears far-fetched and strained, to say the least. Gradually, however, as our society grows more advanced technologically this seemingly overreaching statement becomes increasingly more realistic. With the birth of the Internet, social networking sites, and public broadcasting channels such as YouTube, a wholly interconnected civilization is truly not too far off in our future. The feature film documentary, Life In a Day, showcases modern technology’s emerging ability to extend and create networks between individuals on a global scale, presenting evidence that Mufasa’s statement is not as idealistic and naive a belief as we had previously thought.
Life In a Day is a crowd-sourced documentary feature film made possible through the collaboration of National Geographic, Scott Free Productions, and the social broadcasting site, YouTube, teamed up with director, Kevin Macdonald, and editor, Joe Walker. Centered on filmmaker, Humphrey Jennings’ movement of “Mass Observation,” which attempted to capture the beauty in everyday, ordinary life, Life In a Day opened its own YouTube channel, accepting submissions from anyone and everyone across the globe with Internet access, able to upload footage of their lives on one single day, July 24, 2010, onto the social broadcasting site. Thereafter, the film was made as a social experiment by compiling various footage chosen from the submissions to portray most accurately one day of life on planet earth, via a myriad of individual experiences from Zambia, to Australia. While every submission was obviously not incorporated in the final film, Macdonald archived the unused footage on the film’s YouTube channel, keeping it constantly available for the global community to view.
The groundbreaking aspect of Life In a Day lies with the technology behind YouTube, as it gives the film’s contributors, making submissions from literally all over the world, the ability to genuinely connect with one another. The film itself is one large communication network between each contributor and the director, similar to the one discussed in chapter 2 of David Easley and Jon Kleinberg’s Networks, Crowds, and Markets, as each contributor’s uploaded footage on his computer represents a node, linked to the director/editor’s main YouTube channel on his computer, via edges formed when submissions are made by the contributor and viewed by the director for the purpose of the film. The network, however, is in fact more connected than it first appears with edges only between contributor and director, as YouTube in its essence, makes it so that each contributor can view others’ submitted footage as well as their own. Thus edges are formed between individual contributor nodes as well when they view each other’s submissions.
The communication network parallels the example of the Arpanet in figure 2.2 and 2.3 of Networks (Easley 25, 26). However, unlike the Arpanet communication network of computer operating systems, this network not only involves footage on computers connected to other footage on computers, it involves people as well. Because of the personal information contributors submit to the public, the communication network simultaneously acts as a social network, providing possibilities of new personal relationships. Within the communication and social network, however, lie more clustered networks, as individual contributors who chose similar subjects to focus on in their submissions (i.e. “mybeautifulgirlfriend,” footsteps, and the moon –refer to article), are like-minded and thus may have an even stronger tie to each other. Film viewers also form a network with the contributors, as they represent nodes connected by edges, where a node, v (viewer), is connected to a node, c (contributor), with an edge that is formed when the viewer, v, watches contributor, c’s footage. Under the assumption that each viewer, v, is also able to go home after seeing the movie, and submit his own personal footage on YouTube for contributor, c, to watch as well, these connected nodes may create a strong friendship network, where both parties obtain more information on the other, via their respective video footage of the personal details of their lives on that one day.
The possibilities of the creation and extension of friendship networks thus are endless (at least for those in the global community with access to the Internet). Because Macdonald archived the unused YouTube submissions online for the public to view anytime, the potential for networking does not end with the film itself. Beyond the movie, anyone with access to the Internet is able to view all submissions (over 80,000 videos) at anytime, gaining insight into those individual contributor’s personal lives. Life In a Day thus works in favor of the small world phenomenon with its rapid exchange of personal footage, and may even eventually provide for fewer degrees of separation than Milgram’s proven six. As the documentary already begins to give examples of a growing global network community, Life In a Day ultimately proves that Mufasa’s original statement of the “circle of life” is in actuality, an accurate prediction of an even more technologically advanced future where “we are all connected” indeed.
One example of a communication network where contributor and director are nodes, linked when footage submitted/viewed form the edges between them.
YouTube's Life In a Day channel
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