Going GoPro

It’s all a matter of perspective.

Despite the promise of the ad above, the television I grew up with was a third-person medium. In drama and comedy, the preferred shot was a medium-length two-shot, because the camera was bulky and mounted on a rolling tripod. For sports, the distance was even greater; cameras were often mounted high up, far from the playing field, using long telephoto lenses. The viewer was, in fact, a spectator, and even more isolated from the action than if he or she were present at the event. At least at the event one can choose where to look; on television, one saw only what the director chose.

From this point of view, we saw many spectacular things, of course. One of my earliest experiences occurred in 1955, during qualifying for the Gold Cup hydroplane race in Seattle.

The pride of Seattle, Slo-Mo-Shun V, was near the end of its qualifying run: Spectacular, unforgettable … but distant, out “there”. We could never know what driver Lou Fageol felt as the boat’s bow lifted, floated higher, soared into the sky, and then crashed back down onto the concrete-hard water. In some ways, we might as well have been reading about it.

So it was with most sports; viewers were “outside” the action, distanced and divorced from the players on the field or racecourse. No matter how much we might identify with a jersey, no matter how loudly we might shout at the screen during a touchdown or a homerun, television kept us away.

No longer. Television technology has evolved along a steady path taking us from passivity to participation. Want to know what driving an unlimited hydroplane feels like? Watch this:

 From first-person shooter gaming to soldiers in combat, we’ve transformed our experience into something more closely resembling real life. Instead of being told about the experience by a narrator, we’re, as much as possible, sharing it (without the sometimes painful consequences). And instead of consumers of video, we have increasingly become producers of it, documenting our lives as they happen in a way never before possible.

And what’s really remarkable is how quickly this has all happened and how quickly we’re internalized it as “normal”. You Tube was only founded in early 2005, nine years ago. Go Pro, which manufactures the cameras that have made first-person video so popular, was founded in 2002. The kinds of stunning action sequences that were once available only to moviemakers like Steven Spielberg that were so technically revolutionary (like the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan in 1998) are now available to us all. In terms of living vicariously, of “participating” in lives and events we could never know in “real” life, television has finally, after some 500 years, pulled even with reading—maybe even ahead.