Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy

I think that's an uncharitable assessment.

We constantly filter out a lot of noise - auditory and visual. Our memories of events lack that noise. Naive recordings - such as what complete amateurs using smart phones will produce - will have all of that noise. So the recording of the event will not match our memory, partially because it will record things that were not important.

In order for the recording to match our memory, it would need to filter out all of the auditory and visual noise. But that's just the start. There's also the fact that amateur videos tend to not do a good job of showing what a viewer may want to pay attention to. As a participant, you can, without thinking, look around to see exactly what you want to see. This ease of knowing your surroundings will be a part of your memory, and the video will likely not capture it.

A professionally made video could alleviate most of these problems. That's why editing movies is hard, and considered an art. Showing viewers the right shots for the right length of time to give them certain understandings of a scene is crucial to making the viewer feel like they are there.

My point: you're assuming that the video recording is somehow an "objective" view of reality, and your memory is "subjective." Your memory certainly is subjective, but I say the video is, too. Raw videos are not how we experience life, nor are they "reality", so I think it's uncharitable to conclude the author only wants fantasy recordings.

I can partially agree with you here; The way we perceive the present is certainly not the way it comes through on camera. However, I don't believe that adding a filter to an Instagram photo brings the photo any closer to the way we experienced that moment either. People slap filters on photos to give them an artsy touch and to make their lives look like something to be jealous of when the photo shows up on some social network's news feed.

So yes: if someone were able to devise a way of capturing memories that could be played back the way the really felt, that would be ideal. But since we can't, I'd rather see that event as it was than distorted in some mostly random direction.

Having said that, this is not me taking a swing at Instagram. I think it's a great product, and I have a lot of fun with it. I'm just saying that the author's logic train here is rather faulty.