The practical test that I did with my partner Jess was a short, half-hour long video that chronicled thirty minutes of me using my phone, from within the phone. In other words, it was a screen recording of the different things I did and how I wasted my time on my phone. The main characteristic that we were responding to was the unregulated nature of online screen production, as I talked about in my development blog post.
Our test responds to this characteristic as it demonstrates that you can publish anything you want on the internet. While a screen capture may be insightful or educational, the one we made wasn’t particularly, or at least that wasn’t the intention. It was 29 minutes and 15 seconds of a vague pointlessness. However, that didn’t stop us making it and dropping into the void of the internet.
It also responded to the “unregulated” characteristic as it highlighted the variety of things I could do on my phone, but more importantly on the internet, through my phone. Messaging friends, searching the internet, playing games, taking photos, publishing my photos. This further demonstrates how many different technologies the internet has given birth to, and helps us imagine what could be to come. So maybe we could say that our video or short film wasn’t totally pointless, but it definitely wasn’t of a high quality.
In terms of what I learnt about online screen production, I learnt about a whole new way of making! The screen capture is totally exclusive to the screen world and is so embedded in modernity that it can’t really be separated from the internet either. Our experiment reminded me of something I’ve been seeing on Facebook lately- stories told completely through text (as if you were one of the texters). While the stories themselves are basic, it’s an incredibly innovative way to tell a story and it made me think about the other possibilities of telling stories through screen capture, beyond just texting. What’s to say you couldn’t make a feature-length film from the perspective of a phone screen?
Making this also really expanded in my mind the idea of publishing pointless content, either as an experiment or because, well, why not? A live stream of a watch ticking. A video of a blank canvas. A timelapse of my dog sleeping. It can be done, so easily. It would be interesting to gauge people’s reactions to pointless content if it was coming up in their news feeds.
My question moving forward is how can we make something that is expanding the possibilities of the internet, but something that isn’t pointless? I want to think about innovation and creation in a time where anything is possible.