In his 2018 book “Bit by Bit,” Matthew Salganik describes one feature of digital trace data (such as Twitter or Facebook posts) as being “aways on,” meaning that such data are produced continuously without any researcher having to design a project, acquire funding, and start data collection. One exciting consequence of this is that digital trace data allow us to study unexpected events.
Although they receive less attention than digital trace data, in many ways videos are also “always on.” You can find a perfect example of this in a Tweet from yesterday, February 1, 2021, which shows a video of an aerobic instructor in Myanmar filming her class outside, and accidentally capturing part of the military coup that unfolded that day.
The video was reported in this article in The Guardian.
