You've Already Been There

 Our new television is fifty inches in its diagonal. Ginger considered this to be enormous. I laughed, telling her it was on the small size for sets these days. 

The fact that it has become a live streaming device for an Iceland volcano buttresses the circular journey from 2014, which is when we bought our last set while living in SW Portland. We wound up moving out of that apartment at the end of that summer in part to embark on an extended trip through Europe that lasted through the rest of the journey. We had begun in Iceland, where we spent 8 days driving the Ring Road.

Seeing these Youtube videos of Iceland, both the live feeds as well as the recorded ones, brought back the vividness of being there.  I mean this in an almost a literal sense. The Youtube videos made me feel as if I were actually there again. 

I've noticed this about Youtube videos compared to the professionally produced television programs we were used to. The professionally produced program never made me feel as if I had visited a place before I went there. They are, and always have been, a purposely falsehood, manipulated to create a false version that is considered more entertaining or informative. This is true even with big screen LCD televisions. One knows the images aren't really "real."

Youtube videos made by amateurs are different. They seem to duplicate the experience of visiting a place in a virtual reality way. The upside is that one can visit a place without going there. The downside is that it means when you actually go to a place, it can feel too familiar, as if you have already been there many times.

Folks talk about the era of virtual reality experiences. I feel as if we are already there, but only partially because of screen technology. The more powerful reason is that we are seeing the crudeness of amateur-shot videos with editing that preserves the continuity of moving from place to place on the land. This is probably the most important thing---the lack of chopped-up editing in the brochure-like videos made by professionals. More and more I find professional videos to be boring and egotistical expressions of the self-absorbed people who made them. More and more, only amateurs are interesting to me.