Reflections on Travel and Video

I am sitting in Heathrow Airport in the Virgin Atlantic lounge waiting for the last leg of an almost endless trip from Cairo to NY, via Tel Aviv and London.  

We have spent the past 10 days in Israel and Egypt - right on the tourist track.

What I noticed more than anything else was the ubiquity of video cameras. Pretty much everyone has one - from the tourists visiting the pyramids to the camel drivers trying to get the tourists to pose on their camels.  

Video is everywhere.

And everyone is making them.

Sometimes I shudder when I see someone wildly panning around.  

I had to be physically restrained from grabbing one Japanese guy at the Citadel of Muhammad Ali (not the boxer).  This guy was waving his HDV camera all over the place.  "Don't Move The F$#ing Camera!".

What happens to all these videos?

For the most part, nothing.  They will be inflicted on a few hapless friends and relatives who have no choice but to marvel at the four hours of raw footage from Egypt. Then, they will mercifully be committed to a hidden shelf in some bedroom closet never to be seen again.

What struck me however, watching these thousands and thousands of videographers at work was the enormous yet untapped potential before us.  

The world is quite literally being recorded inch by inch.  But it's going nowhere, and it's pretty much a mess.

We should harness this enormous effort and create something of it - perhaps a global gazateer, universally accessable. Or at the very least, a kind of global earth for the tourist - in video ...and better shot.