Lysergic radiance, sneaky narcissism and the worldie

The genre is characterized by point of view, by brevity and by incident. The ones that go viral contain something extraordinary, be it unimaginable risk, uncharted beauty, unlikely encounter or unexpected twist. The categories bleed.

So writes Nick Paumgarten of GoPro videos.  GoPro technology can certainly capture extremes and  make available things that may be “worthy of wonder” if not necessarily “great wonder” according to Girolamo Cardano's classification of 1557; but it can also leverage self-obsession and instrumentality. Paumgarten suggests that, like Google Glass, GoPro has the insidious effect of making the pervasiveness of cameras seem benign when it may one day be anything but.

An example without human self-regard here.