Interlude 2: SydNYE

It’s December 31ts, 2019, and people start coming en masse to the vantage points where they will be able to witness the beautiful firework displays of the Harbour Bridge. The event is so popular that people start arriving in the early morning, waiting for almost 20 hours for the event. And when the time comes… cellphones everywhere. Why? My question is not a reprimand at all. People can do whatever they want. I am interested in the reasons people have to do it; several come to mind.

First, it has to be mentioned that there is an official recording of this event everyone knows about, easily accessible on YouTube. In that sense, we can exclude scarcity as an explanation. People are not recording the fireworks because they think they will not be able to access another recording of the event besides their own.

However, there is something unique about each person’s recording: it is egocentric, in the descriptive sense of the word, as “self-centered”. In this case, people’s recording would be motivated by a concern with perspective. People record because they want to capture their perspective of the event; the event itself (which is better captured by the official recording) is beyond the point. If we think about it, this is reasonable. If one of the main purposes of recording is keeping a memory alive, this is more likely to happen with your own, perspectival, recording.

However, two issues remain here. First, it is not clear what is the experience people can recall afterwards by watching the recording of the event. You would expect to recall your watching of the event itself. But the point is that most people recording the event are watching at their cellphones’ screen to make sure they get a good shot. In other words, their recording seems to interfere with the thing that the recording is supposed to remind them of later. But memory is weak anyway. Probably, a few years later, you will see the recording and think about how beautiful the fireworks looked in the sky when the truth is that you were not looking at the sky but a tiny representation of it on your cellphone screen. Secondly, if you look at a group of friends you will see that all of them are recording. Yes, it is true that we can only occupy a single spot in the space-time continuum. But it is also true that we often occupy damn similar spots. Disregarding slight variations, a group of friends recording the same thing will end up with a very similar recording. This fact opens up the door to another explanation.

Maybe people are not worried about perspective but uniqueness. They want to have something unique even if they could barely distinguish it from others’ (e.g. their friends’ recording). I believe this drive could find its justification in social media. The recording’s main purpose is not to recall a beautiful memory (something you could perfectly do by asking a friend to share his/her video with you) but to show off. And for this purpose, your friend’s recording is no good. If you both share the same thing on social media, you will hurt your chances of people believing you were actually there (assuming both you and your friend have some social media friends in common).

An additional reason has to do with the recording devices themselves and how they could impose on us. Think about the cliche question of whether products answer to needs or create them. Had people a need to record their experiences before recording devices? I find questions like these hopeless but believe some of them point in an important direction. The fact is that people started recording with the introduction of these devices and that these devices seem to reinforce that behavior. These devices become better and better at recording and this increases people’s excitement about the activity of recording itself. People then can’t wait to take a photo using the new iPhone and see how it looks. And this excitement is further bolstered by the fact that people invest significant amounts of money purchasing these products. So the next big event becomes the perfect occasion to put my new iPhone camera to the test.

In conclusion, NYE fireworks crowds could be responding to several psychological facts about human nature: reputation (social media self-promotion), novelty (testing innovations) and consistency (squeezing value out of an expensive transaction). This is an empirical matter, of course. I would also like to finish by pointing out that explanations and justifications are completely different. The act of recording this in particular is, to me, mostly pointless.