By: Sameer Padania, Posted: Nov 18 08

Global

Other

home movies, video

In case you can't tell, it's my day to catch up on all things New York Times...

David Pogue, that paper's personal technology columnist, posted recently on why he, we, shoot video and take photographs - and why we want to archive them. His suggestions:

1. For our older selves.
2. For our descendants.
3. For pleasure.
4. For historians.
5. For posterity.

Of course, people the world over are taking and sharing footage, and much of it is precisely for those reasons. YouTube, for instance, currently receives 14 hours of footage per second (that's right - per second). And our ancestors weren't much different - Home Movie Day and I For India are just two great examples.

While here at WITNESS we're working with video in a very different way - as a core tool in human rights work and advocacy - some of those reasons hold true for our work and the work of our partners, and it's definitely a key part of the Hub. My colleagues in the WITNESS Media Archive blog regularly on these topics - most recently here.