Please step away from the camera

The thing about this whole social media thing, is that people who do not understand media, but understand social, have convinced the world in general that everyone, given a chance, is a great storyteller.

This is simply not true. Most people are terrible storytellers. Most social media is not insignificantly awful, it is awful at a very significant level.

Cheap cameras are now really cheap and the refrain of citizen journalism floats on the wind. This is a very dangerous situation. It leads to temptation, the temptation to buy cheap cameras and send them to citizens. It's like that deal where you park illegally for just a second while you run into the store, you know you could get burned with a ticket but you take the risk anyways because you can save a few cents.

You get the ticket and you owe forty bucks. Same with cameras.

Faced with a massive budget and the denial of that budget, we tried to cheat things by sending cheap cameras to people to record the stories for us. We did the pre-interviews. We prepared training documents, and we hoped we wouldn't get caught. We got caught.

I'd give our attempt a 30% success rate. With work, 30% of the footage will be usable, the rest, not so much.

The people we sent the cameras to appeared to try very hard to do a good job, but the truth of it is that you can't replace professional storytellers with a canon in a pelican case and 3 sheets of instructions.

And I'm thankful for the work they did for us, and I think for some, if we'd keep sending them cameras they'd get better and better as they learn the craft, but then that's kind of like training professionals isn't it?

I equate what we tried to do with many social media efforts, same idea, pros aren't needed when amateurs, or neverteurs are willing.

1. Social media only works because you don't expect it to do anything other than whatever it wants to. Once you have expectations, then you are doomed.

2. Social media only works because with 8 billion people an hour submitting videos to youtube an hour, 1 or 2 of them are going to be naturally gifted, or uniquely strange enough to draw eyeballs.