Drifting Nostalgias/Reel Lives

In some parts of this clip of the set of the shooting of the Andy Griffith Show title sequence you can't tell if there is a scene being shot, or if people are just casually mingling: playing catch, flying a kite, etc. In essence, it's a reality TV experience but back then it was kind of a home movie. Then when you watch the show opener with the famous whistled theme, you realize how much of real reality, real memory and real cinematic memories get combined in the fake realities we experience. This gives us an opportunity to stand outside all realities and "watch" them for what they are, and you have an "aha" moment: TV got us where we are now and the internet, social media, AI, and the IoT will get us where we now going. If you read the comments they are mostly nostalgic--wanting to go back to those times. In 50 years there will be some new medium and the platforms built on it that will be equally nostalgic, but the nostalgia for 60s TV will fade completely and be replaced with nostalgia for 2016. That seems impossible but it will be true to many people.

Reel Lives:

Interesting: When you look at individual stills, people are looking at the still camera as opposed to the film camera. The gaze is a clue of social context and is something we perhaps take for granted and confuse with real life after perception is corrupted by watching films. It's also interesting to see them slipping in and out of character while posing for snapshots, which is perhaps easier to notice because we don't have the distractions of sound which redirects attention, or posits other contexts or emtions.

November 2023: It's interesting how "missing teeth" on the internet changes the context of existing context. With a missing video, we have to find the context, or imagine what it is.