Jason C. Romero's Website

Of course, when I say that my life is boring, I mean that it is boring in a visual sense, not that I don’t find my life interesting. Rather than complain about my life, the goal of recording this video was to capture and express the way that my experience of reality is mediated through this device. Now, when I experience the world, it is evaluated for its visual interestingness — “Is this something I can capture on video and share with the world?” — in addition to be evaluated for being photographed, poeticized, storied, noted, blogged, or narrativized by some other means.

Having this camera fills me with the same sense I’m sure many others experience when they start their first blog, or, now, Twitter account — how am I going to fill this space? It’s a bit like having a blindingly blank page in front of me at all times, except that the criteria for making it go away is different.

All of these technologies for recording and sharing ourselves — they are also part of what makes us into cyborgs. With this video camera, I’m no longer myself, but myself-video-camera, just as I am myself-blog, myself-Twitter, and myself-notebook. In turn, not only are my memories of reality shaped through these devices, but the “me” that others experience is too, especially since I wouldn’t have shared this thought if I hadn’t recorded that video.