Life in a Day is, at its core, a documentary film. But its scope is what sets it apart - it is nothing less than a global snapshot of humanity.
The project asked people all over the world - and in places where "media" is not as ubiquitous as in the West, the film's producers and editors sent cameras - to video record their lives on a specific day: July 24, 2010. The producers expected to receive perhaps 15,000 submissions; they got more than 80,000, a total of 4500 hours of images mundane and extraordinary.
Through a process of cataloging and culling, the editors present the finished film in 1:35. It is available for full viewing on YouTube, and is also now available on NetFlix or DVD.
Life in a Day is sponsored by YouTube, and took advantage of YouTube's massive video servers to collect and catalog the clips. The clips were shot by amateurs - ordinary people - using HandyCams and $100 flash memory cameras, iPhones, what have you. Some clips are grainy, poorly lit, jittery, out-of-focus - it doesn't matter. The content is so compelling in aggregate that the intercutting and juxtapositions become lyrical.
The structure is loose, the themes broad, and there is no plot. The entire film may be summed up as "Life happens." There are funny moments and inspiring ones, profound moments and tragic ones. It's like, you know, life.
I picked out one particular contribution, about an 11-year-old shoeshine boy from Peru. His story is woven through other stories. He appears briefly, we move on to something else, and just about when we have forgotten him, he reappears, framed in his doorway holding his green and white laptop, supplied by the One Laptop Per Child project. This boy lives in conditions the poorest Americans would consider appalling. He works because his mother has died and he must help support his family, and he finds both refuge and escape through Wikipedia. "Wikipedia has everything," he says. "It has stories, and history, and maths, and science." He uses his laptop to play games, to draw, to write stories. "It is my friend," he says, "like my sister."
We leave him, believing - or wanting to believe - he will make it, will succeed, escape the tragic conditions life has dealt him. His worldliness and joie de vive, despite his core sadness, seem well beyond his years, and too strong to fail. That is, if disease or hunger or street thieves after the coins in his pocket don't do him in first. He has connected to the larger world, a world he might never even know of if not for the OLPC and Wikipedia. We in higher education can bemoan Wikipedia's "amateur" nature all we like, but for millions, and soon billions of people, it may be the closest they ever get to a library, or a school.
The internet is not for Americans only, or for the well-to-do. It's not just shopping and friending and World of Warcraft. It is a lifeline, a potential rescue out of desperate conditions, perhaps the only chance millions upon millions will ever have.
It is incumbent upon us - the internet wealthy - to not just focus on how the web can entertain us, or make us richer, but how it can make the world better. Life in a Day helps us remember that, and more.
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