Life in a day: When the Internet is changing the time dimension

By John Giannatos

I admit that the Internet has never ceased to amaze me. When I say the “internet: I don’t mean internet cables or communications protocols, but uses that people have come up with to help them create new things, new ideas and innovations.

Take for example the new brainchild of Ridley Scott, the cinematic experiment “ life in a day”.

Life in a Day is a documentary film project by YouTube. Users sent in videos of themselves filmed on a particular day, July 24th, 2010, and then Ridley Scott produced and edited the videos into a film.

Trailer below:



The impressive thing is not only that scenes were collected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 140 nations, but the fact that the film serves as a time capsule, to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.

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That’s magical in itself!!

It's amazing what people can do through the internet.

To each one of us, time is both relative and absolute.
The relative value of each second can be totally different for everyone, even though in absolute terms, it is still one second. I mean, waiting for time to go by during a bad moment is not the same as how quickly time goes by during a very wonderful moment, even though the time value may be the same.

The amazing thing with this documentary is that it lets us view time in another dimension, not linear but three-dimensional.
For example, in the future we can gather material for any given minute (e.g. September 27, 2014 at 14:10), and we will then be watching hundreds of discrete moments making up many hours in total, but all representing exactly that second in time.

To experience feelings and situations that happened at a very second...

This is a journey through time stopped.

A journey of life, where a second can last thousands of hours ....

As Bill Hicks said: “We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively."

We are not accustomed to such interpretations. As we were not accustomed to communicating through skype, sending email, staying connected forever with friends from the past through facebook (this is a freeze in time as well ...), or have colleagues that we have never met in person, and all these new habits have been learned through the internet.

The internet has changed our lives and technology can actually drive history.

The life in a day, is the proof that the internet has made us citizens of a large village. Humans like a forest; a whole made up of individuals, a conglomerate.

I am fortunate to live these moments of historical development of the Internet, and this is something that will be assessed maybe 200 years from now, by those who read the story. And all that happened today will be for them, historical events that revolutionized 20th and 21st century existence.