It was interesting how Jill Walker Rettberg’s book laid out a sort of genealogy or family tree of today’s “selfie” phenomenon. One thing in particular that struck me was the “picture-a-day” video phenomenon that launched around the time that YouTube became popular. If this was a point on the family tree of the selfie, then I think it is safe to say that this picture-a-day trend was a point where the tree branched off in separate directions to eventually develop into different things. One branch continued to develop the idea of a public sharing of digital self-portraits, while the other branch developed the picture-a-day concept. Soon many people were starting these types of projects, and like Rettberg said, even apps were developed to help anyone achieve their desired product. Soon, the picture-a-day moved to “second-a-day” video compilations, showing snapshots of action in a person’s daily life over the span of time.

Then, last year in 2014, an organization in England called Save the Children U.K. launched a campaign called If London Were Syria to raise awareness for children living under war conditions. A part of this campaign was the viral video Most Shocking Second a Day Video, which portrays a second a day in a young girl’s life under the circumstances of a hypothetical civil war that unfolds in London. The events portrayed in the video are said to be based on factual accounts of children in Syria. This campaign capitalized on the past viral successes of videos in the photo/second a day format, and developed a way to format it to the equally popular trend of raising social awareness through online and social media platforms. This combination worked: the video reached 23 million views on YouTube in just one week.

It is interesting to discover the different evolutions of online trends and digital technologies through this class. Having grown up during this Internet boom, I probably would have never made the connection that these digital developments branch off of each other, often going farther back than before the creation of the Internet itself.