Director's Commentary

Click here for Tara's Video

I spent the majority of the last six years of my life teaching at a secondary boarding school in the middle of the jungle of northeastern Bolivia.  We started out with no running water and no electricity on our campus.  Our home didn’t even have a floor, windows, or doors.  Life was relatively slow.  We washed our laundry and our dishes in the river, cooked in the communal kitchen, and ate, played games, and read books by candlelight in the evenings when the sun went down. We didn’t carry cell phones because there wasn’t any signal.  We didn’t use computers unless we charged up our laptop in town to watch a movie at the school.  Life was slow. And connected.

During these same years, technology in the United States continued to change drastically.  When we left in 2005, flip phones were in, texting was not.  Internet was something you had on your computer, unless you were one of the techie few who had the newest products with the latest technology.  Now, netbooks, smartphones, and tablets are the “norm” for many people.  We carry the internet at our fingertips all the time.  We can email, post to Facebook, follow our people on Twitter, check our flights, Skype our friends overseas, text our contacts, take photos, record videos, get the latest news, check the current weather and the forecast, identify our exact GPS coordinates, and so much more just by pulling out our cell phone, that thing we used to use only to call people.  

When I returned to the States recently, I noticed that just about everyone I see carries a smartphone.  Admittedly, I also have a smartphone and use it all the time for almost everything except calling people.  I have a laptop that I am using in some form or another throughout most of the day.  I am connected, just like everyone else I know.  

One Saturday afternoon after lunch with some friends, I looked up from my computer and noticed that all nine adults in the room were using their computers, tablets, or smartphones.  We continued to talk a little and socialize a bit while everyone was glancing at their devices more than just periodically.  A few days later, as I talked with one of my friends, I noticed that she was texting and only half-listening to me.  A comic that I had seen suddenly came to mind in which a woman asks her husband if she can tape the phone to her forehead so that she can at least pretend that he is paying attention to her as she speaks.  All of a sudden the idea came to me.  We are more connected than ever by way of our high speed internet and our plethora of handy, pocket-sized devices.  And yet, it seems like as connected as we are, there is an amazing amount of disconnect in our society because we are all so busy being “connected.”

In the video “family bonding,” I wanted to show a group of friends and family doing an “exaggerated” version of what I had seen that Saturday afternoon. I don’t have a lot of technical equipment, so I didn’t focus much on lighting or awesome recording.  I mainly just focused on getting the idea across in an effective way.  I chose to record the scene in an authentic family room with most of the same people who were there that Saturday.  I wanted the groups of people to not interact with each other, just with their devices.  We were all actually using our own devices doing real activities during the video.  I included the captions to add to the “shallowness” of the “bonding.”  The small child with his statement was supposed to give a glimpse into the mind of a three-year old in today’s connected world.  “Fun” or “funny” used to be more than looking at videos and pictures on an iPad.  Even the dog is seeking attention from the computer world.  The iPhone-inspired statement that closes the video is intended to drive home the idea of disconnect in our highly connected world.   

I hope you enjoyed the video.