By A few years ago, I remember watching a show on television called – America’s Funniest Home Videos. The show was basically about funny home videos of people doing funny things that they would be embarrassed to show strangers.
It had videos that displayed, for example, a person trying to open a bottle and the entire liquid falling on his face or a baby getting confused with the noise coming from his squeaky shoes or a dog getting aggressive with his own mirror reflection. Some of these videos were genuinely funny while others were more about a person getting mildly hurt.
However, what was common about all these videos was that they were taken unintentionally. In fact, in many of these videos, you could hear the cameraperson squeaking, “Yay! I got it on video!”
The tagline of this show was that – if you can get it in video; you can get it in cash. There were cash prizes for the funniest videos, thus, encouraging viewers and people, in general, to be ready with a camera in their hands- to capture any unanticipated moment that was funny or embarrassing or both.
The show was a huge success and recently celebrated its 35th anniversary. It was cheap way to earn a few bucks- just hold a camera in your hand and be ready. The thought of encouraging people to always be ready to shoot is what is the prime feature of today’s social media culture.
Most social media content has only two primary requirements- to have a camera always ready to shoot, which coincidentally is a rather easy task as literally we have a smartphone as a camera. The second requirement is the will to be recorded, which is what most ‘influencers’ are comfortable with.
More so, this entire setup of being able to shoot and having the will to be recorded, is basically a payment generating setup. In AFV, only a few members got cash prizes but in the scenario of any moderately successful social media channel- this is normalcy. Now, it is not about being a good videographer or being funny, even being average is fine.
This culture of recording has reached its zenith in the case of ‘vlogs’ – of recording your entire life on video and gaining viewership. These are also the easiest as you don’t need to specify a domain- what can be the domain of your life- everything?
AFV was way ahead of its time and understood this game a long while ago. The downside of this is when social media turns into a factory for similar content creation. This is what being viral is all about. For example, a particular scene/dance/music has attained a high viewership. The easiest way to be successful in the social media game is to pick up the same topic and do the exact same thing. Of course, this has to be done with a certain amount of consistency and that involves hard work. What is alarming is when people spend a major chunk of their time doing just this and call it- content creation’!
The videos shown in AFV are funny because they celebrate life and the goofiness that it inherently contains. These videos are of people caught off-guard in situations that are not anticipated. That is where today’s social media loses out- it makes you re-create funny moments just because they have been proved to be entertaining.
People had called the Television an idiot Box’, as people were glued to it for hours doing nothing. You know what is scarier- turning into an idiot, repetitively trying to re-create and re-enact videos.
They say- be a doer not a watcher. However, doing exactly what is done just because of its proved success is the extreme example of having a borrowed life.
Just do it – not re-do!
