It occurred to me today that video footage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I am a technologist for the school district where I also teach; I’ve been doing this for nine years now, part-time teaching and part-time “fixing anything that has an electrical cord.” Part of what I do as a technologist for the school district is to maintain the video surveillance systems that we have in our buildings. Often, this will require me to get video footage off of the server, especially in situations where something has happened and our administrative team wants to see the video of the event.

This is usually a pretty straight-forward process. In fact, many of our administrators will use video footage to sort out “what really happened”, especially in the event that conflicting stories come from different people involved in various situations in any of our school buildings.

Most of the time, video footage provides us with the ability to make unclear situations somewhat more clear.

Most of the time…

* * *

My wife and I recently finished watching on Netflix whatever it was that we were watching, and she suggested that we look for something new. We ended up finding a show featuring a magician, doing street magic in front of a camera crew, usually with random bystanders as subjects. The show is called “Magic For Humans”. We’ve really started enjoying it.

But, like all shows about magic or magicians, I usually spend most of my time trying to figure out how the magician does what they do. It becomes ultimately frustrating for me to watch someone do a magic trick and to not understand how they’re doing it. Eventually, if we watch too many episodes of this show in a row, I get overwhelmed by frustration. From a general perspective, I understand how the magician does their tricks –> it’s usually sleight of hand, of some kind or other. But, knowing how something works in general, for a guy like me, is never enough. I have always wanted to understand how things work, at a fundamental level.

But, the more I’ve been thinking about the magic that this guy does (Justin Willman is the name of the magician on the show), the more I start to wonder if my own eyes aren’t tricking me, somehow?!?! Additionally, I start to wonder if there isn’t some kind of trickery happening “off-camera” that would explain what appears to have no explanation otherwise.

* * *

I think if I see one more video of an instance of police brutality at any point in the near future, I AM GOING TO LOSE MY MIND. I’ve had just about enough of the dash cam footage and the body cam footage and the cell phone footage. But, let me put my views on police brutality aside for the moment.

It’s getting to the point that people are becoming accustomed to recording just about anything at all. Just the other day, as a matter of fact, there was a semi-truck parked in front of my house (I live in a small town where semi through-traffic is unusual), so what did I do? I started filming the cab of the semi, waiting to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. Ten minutes later, the driver drove away.

We’ve become a video surveillance society and there aren’t very many mainstream people who have a problem with it. Every smartphone ever made has at least one camera on it; these days, most of them have multiple cameras. The number of functioning video cameras in America, at this very moment, is exponentially larger than the number of video cameras created in all of the twentieth century put together.

All of these cameras, capturing just about every public moment, from multiple angles, should cause anyone thinking about doing anything questionable in public to think twice. Additionally, everyone who grabs their phone and starts recording with it at the moment when something seems like it might possibly go crazy; do you know what those recordings usually capture? The social activist who decides to record the actions of the police every time they’re around, what does that social activist usually record?

Nothing.

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I’m sure you’ve seen the same kind of videos that I’m thinking about –> the particular ones that I’m thinking about right now come from a group of guys known as “Dude Perfect”. Look them up on the web and watch some of their videos. You will understand what I’m talking about.

They have these crazy videos where something amazing happens in the video, like the eighty-foot basketball shot that goes through, nothing but net. As amazing as that video is, and as much fun as they are to watch, I’m absolutely certain that these videos capture the six hundredth attempt by the person on camera to do the amazing things that they do.

The previous five hundred and ninety-nine times, the shot fails.

But we never see those videos. And not seeing them changes the way that we understand how things work in the world.

One of my kids, a few months back, decided that they were going to make one of these videos. You want to know what happened? My child stopped trying long before they were able to capture the video of the perfect shot. When they quit, they told me, “I didn’t think it was going to be that hard.”

They didn’t think it was going to be hard because they weren’t made to watch the five hundred and ninety-nine fails.

* * *

Over the course of the last two months, as I’ve worked to try to remotely assist the staff members of my school district, I’ve discovered that I miss the personal interaction that we were cheated out of –my coworkers and I– by the pandemic and the quarantine. It is INFINITELY easier to help someone with the problems that they are having with their computer when those problems can be observed right in front of me. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve had to start asking people, seeking assistance from me, to send me screenshots and image captures of what’s going on for them, so I can at least get a sense of what’s going on, with my own eyes.

Both those screen captures and cell phone videos still can’t replace my ability to see what is going on with my own eyes. And, I think that’s the point of this whole post through which I’ve now finished meandering.

No eye-witness testimony or typed-out affidavit can hold a candle to video footage, in the minds of people these days. However, our over-dependence on video runs on some false assumptions, not the least of which is that our eyes can’t be fooled –which they most certainly can be.

Just be sure, as you consume all of the videos that are out there for you to see, that you don’t let your eyes trick your mind into believing what it ought not.