Concepts of Simultaneity and Community in the Crowd-Sourced Video Diary Life in a Day

This article seeks to contribute to the debate about the relationship between time and social identity by studying the recent trend of simultaneous, crowd-sourced visual diaries. The article focuses on the concept of simultaneity and its relation to communal identity. Crowd-sourced visual diaries such as 2010’s Life in a Day are often celebrated as a means to relativize time and social homogeneity through individual narrative perspectives. To challenge this view, I show how the notion of simultaneity itself can be appropriated for purposes of legitimation and how Life in a Day’s universalist understanding of simultaneity actually undermines the heterogeneity of time that the project was meant to celebrate.