A Second a Day for a Year - Show and Tell Presentation

For my show and tell presentation, I presented with Alyssa Vossler and we showed a video by a popular YouTube vlogger, or “YouTuber”, Morgan Yates. The video was titled A Second a Day for a Year and the video consisted of exactly that; a one-second video that she took every single day for the entirety of 2016. The video snippets included things from something simple like a shot of her food or her rising follower count to something exciting like a concert or basketball game. These moments were captured in a 7-minute video showing the past year in her life, which I will admit made me a little emotional to watch. There’s just something so touching about being able to look back at the past year and see all your friends and memories that you made.

After the video, we discussed some different viewpoints that people had on the video. In the description of the video, Morgan Yates stated that she had a hard time picking just one second per day and some days she posted more than a second-long video clip. From her perspective, it must have been fun and nostalgic to go through all the videos that she had taken that year to compile the final video.

Alyssa and I brought up a different point of view: did she take away from her memories that she made by trying to video everything? We discussed this in class earlier in the semester, but is our obsession with sharing everything online taking away from experiencing things “in the moment”? Filming things such as a concert or being at the Final Four basketball game means you’re probably focusing more on getting a good video than you are on actually watching the concert/game. At one point in the video, there was a clip of UNC scoring a basket and the crowd going wild. Since we can reasonably assume that the YouTuber didn’t know the exact time that UNC was going to make a basket, we can probably guess she was videoing the game for a while and just cut to the part where they scored. This takes a decent amount of effort to make sure you’re getting a good shot and showing the full view of the game. So does that take away from the experience of actually being at the game and enjoying it live?

This brings me to another viewpoint on this video, which was brought up in the comments section of the video. Many users were making comments on the video, saying things like “this girl has something exciting going on every day” or “if this was me, it would just be 365 seconds of me sitting in bed, watching Netflix”. This brings up an interesting point, because a lot of time on social media, people aren’t their most “real” selves. I once heard of social media being described as a “highlight reel”, which I think is a perfect way of looking at it. No one posts on Instagram or YouTube the boring parts of their life, like having to brush your teeth or doing laundry. They post the best parts, like going to concerts and hanging out with friends. That’s what she did in the video; she posted the most exciting parts of her day, not the mundane parts.

We ended the discussion by talking about ways that would make a video like this more accurate or realistic. I brought up that taking a video from the same time every day would give a more accurate representation of the year. It’s not just highlights because the best part of your day doesn’t always happen at the same exact time. But if a video is taken at 1:00 PM every day, it can give a more realistic insight. Maybe one day you’re eating lunch at that time, another day you’re at work and another day it’s the weekend and you’ve slept in until 2:00. It depends on the purpose of the video though and what you’re trying to get out of it. For the video we presented, this isn’t the first time that this YouTuber has done a video like this, so her goal was probably to capture the best memories from her year and share them with her viewers. I see her video as more of a memoir of her year, showcasing all the best memories she made and all the experiences she had, so one day she can look back and remember those special moments