The Woman Who Recorded Everything | Answers With Joe

hello there let me start this off with a little story it's a story about the first video i ever uploaded to youtube i've told this story before so if you've heard it you can you know keep listening because i'm a great storyteller okay so it's like 2006 um there's 2007. anyway i had um oh hang on let me go back so i i did um wait no as many of you know i dabble in filmmaking and back in the early aughts i made a movie called oceanfront property and part of doing the whole indie filmmaking thing is that you got to go to film festivals well at the time we're talking 2005 or so there were services online where you could upload your project to various film festivals and stuff but in order to send them a trailer or clips from the film you had to just put it in an email and to get it small enough in size so that it would fit on an email you had to compress it down really small it was about posted stamp size and and you had to make it like five frames a second it was horrible and yeah it sucked because you put all this time and effort into this trailer this was the thing that was supposed to make people want to watch your movie and then you had to just like just destroy it and make it look as horrible as possible as a as an artist it was it was physically painful and then this new thing came out online and with this you could just upload your video to that site and then it would just store it there on that site and all you have to do is send a link in an email to these people and they could click on it and watch it on youtube in glorious 480i quality it was actually a huge step up at the time so yeah i opened up a youtube account and that's when i started my youtube channel and that's what led us where we are right now but yeah youtube was a game changer youtube and vimeo and dailymotion and the like they set the stage for online streaming services like netflix and apple tv and disney plus and all those that have completely upended the entire media landscape a similar tectonic media shift happened in the 80s with vcr for the first time you could record something and then just watch it whenever you wanted to up until then if you weren't in front of your tv when the thing happened you missed the thing the vcr freed up people's lives and gave people a way to save moments that are important to them for posterity i mean how many of you have parents with shelves full of old vhs tapes that can't even be played anymore but for one person the urge to record things became a 35-year obsession an obsession that has created a priceless media archive [Music] marion stokes bought a vcr and began recording tv shows on it in 1977 and she never stopped recording them until her death in 2012. over 35 years of never-ending recording she amassed over 40 000 videotapes equaling 840 000 hours of content they included everything from local shows to national news stories to commercials so when people began to hear about this collection after she died it wasn't surprising to hear her being labeled as crazy or weird but as dennis hopper's character in speed once said tour people are crazy jack i'm eccentric once again i'm sorry if my movie references are too new for you yeats marion stokes would qualify as eccentric she was rich she had strong opinions about media and technology and she was obsessive now look we all have our obsessions i'm sure many of you have been called a geek or worse for having gone down rabbit holes and getting all wrapped up in some tiny little thing that you just for whatever reason are super into maybe you collect baseball cards maybe you collect beanie babies maybe you collect star wars memorabilia or airplane sick bags whatever look if it makes you happy great do you boo but what if it starts to take over your life what if you start to lose living space to it what if it strains your relationships at this point is where somebody might be called a hoarder but let's get real for a second sometimes the difference between a hoarder and a collector is based on things like gender social class and wealth i mean for example an institution that collects items can be just as irrational as a single individual that collects items so yeah the word obsessive can be used to shame or label people but what if that obsession can be used for the greater good in the case of marion stokes that's exactly what she was trying to do marion stokes was a former librarian who worked for the free library of philadelphia from the 1940s to the early 1960s she also engaged in several civil rights issues for example she helped organize buses for the 1963 civil rights march on washington d.c she was also the philadelphia chair for the fair play for cuba committee in the 1960s fought for integrating gerard college for boys and was a founding board member of the national organization for women another way she helped promote social and civil rights issues was a show that she ran with her husband john stokes jr called input it was a weekly panel discussion series that ran on a cbs affiliate in philadelphia from 1968 to 1971 and it focused on social topics including activists clergy and scholars as panelists some of the guests during its run included folk singer pete seeger psychiatrist john fryer and physicist william davidson and i think it was his belief in the power of television that drove her to do all the things that we're about to talk about stokes was a voracious note taker and diarist and she loved making lists of things you could say she just enjoyed documenting stuff to an extreme which is why she qualifies as a hoarder for example she amassed over 50 000 books in her collection and she also had multiple copies of everything that apple ever produced yeah she was like one of the first apple fanboys and she talked all of her family into buying stock when it was only seven dollars a share her assistant frank hilleman estimated that she read 11 newspapers a day and she never threw any of them away in order to house all these collections of her she had nine homes and three storage facilities according to her son michael milotus in 2019 he said quote she had been collecting books and newspapers for most of her life but the television thing really took off from the 1979 iranian hostage crisis that was when she became obsessed with the way stories were reported and how they changed i was 18 at the time and it struck me as strange but my mother was strange for her whole life she was kind of considered an eccentric local celebrity in philadelphia she only ever left her house to record those input shows and then she would go to the bar to have a martini once a day she stepped back from her public activism in the 1960s out of privacy concerns but she still wanted to find a way to keep everybody informed about what was going on and that took the form of taking television she wanted to capture it all as her son said it was the iranian hostage crisis that really set her off and put her into this recording frenzy she didn't believe the news broadcasters and the stories that they were telling she was convinced that the early facts did not line up with what they were saying later on so she started recording so that she could have concrete evidence that the story was changing and then she never stopped this soon became a 24 7 obsession she had multiple tvs recording multiple channels in every room of her house and she always insisted on using vhs tapes because she thought that digital content could be accessed or tracked and if you're wondering how difficult it would be to live with somebody like this yeah it's as bad as it sounds in the interview i mentioned earlier her son talked about how he he admired her for her encyclopedic mind but it was a double-edged sword she would see connections between things that nobody else would he said but that could come with the cost of our emotional relationships he also said quote the bizarre arc of my mother's life is compelling but it was difficult to live in and stokes captured some amazing world events in the 35 years that she was recording everything here's just some of the highlights the iran contra affair the police bombing of the move commune in philadelphia the gulf war magic johnson's announcement that he was hiv positive sinead o'connor ripping up a photo of the pope on saturday night live u.s president bill clinton's impeachment and the shooting of trayvon martin when it came to 911 she documented that cnn was the first news organization to to break the news followed by cbs and abc with fox coming in last and stokes could actually watch two tvs at once and pay attention to both of them at the same time at night she would put in six hour videos to record while she was sleeping and then would wake up first thing in the morning and and trade out the videotapes if she couldn't be there she would have one of her family members do it she would even end dinners at restaurants early so that she could go home and change all the tapes and when she became too old to keep up with the pace of all the changing out of video cassettes and everything she hired an assistant frank to help her out with it when visitors would ask why her house was filled with tvs and vcrs running on a constant loop she would just say i'm archiving marian stokes died at 83 years old on december 14 2012 and for the first time in 35 years the recording stopped if they hadn't stopped that day just a few hours later they would have captured footage of the sandy hook shooting her son would later say quote i remember being very grateful that that wasn't the last news she saw for nearly half her life marion stokes put everything else aside so that she could archive and record everything that happened in the world it gave her life a bit of a rhythm and a purpose and a deep abiding belief guided all of that that someday somebody would find this useful enter the internet archive the internet archive is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a free internet library in fact they've been recording national tv news since 2000 in digital formats to create a searchable archive according to roger mcdonald a librarian for the internet archive quote television has been our most pervasive and persuasive medium but we've never really had much of a pause and rewind button on our experience of it to reflect back on television news to compare and contrast and mine it for knowledge mcdonald heard about stoke's collection and he emailed her son for more information now they have taken on huge collections before but in the 100 and 200 tape range this was a whole other thing he saw value in this collection because a lot of old tv news programs were not saved by the news stations they would use the same tapes and record over them to save money so despite having no idea how to manage all those tapes he decided to take on this archive and do something with it the tapes were sent to the internet archive storage facility in richmond california in 2013 and 2014 and it cost the stokes estate twelve thousand dollars just to ship them and the internet archive is working on digitizing these tapes to this very day and it's gonna take a while yeah each tape has to be loaded into a machine by a person to be digitized and you can't digitize it 2x speed you have to do it in real time so this is 35 years of video on multiple stations so it's going to take a while but the hope is that when it's all said and done it will be able to give people a sense of historical sweep and be able to put news events into context not to mention give context to how news is reported and how we react to the way that news is reported so all that is great and hopefully we'll get exactly that from it but it still came from a pretty dark place when you think about it because in addition to being a hoarder and a collector and an activist she was also paranoid again that's why she recorded everything on vhs tape she thought that digital tapes could be you know accessed in some way and she was convinced that the fbi was spying on her which maybe she felt that way because back when she was more politically active they they were spying on her so there's that and it's interesting that somebody who valued privacy so much would find her collection on the internet which has not been great for privacy consider this there are approximately 1.82 billion websites worldwide containing up to 44 zettabytes of data for example in 2019 more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to youtube every minute that's about 30 000 hours of content per hour and most of that data maybe all of it is very easily retrieved that embarrassing photo that you thought you deleted off of twitter or facebook years ago it's still out there somewhere so when stokes had this opinion that tv news was ruining people's minds um you could say she was ahead of the game on that you know we're super polarized right now with all of us kind of living in echo chambers that simply reflect back to us our own world views this isn't something that just happened this has been going on for a long time which of course has only been exacerbated by the birth of the internet but the stokes archive and others like it give us the ability to look back in time at the forces that changed our opinions over time and guided our world views and gives us a lens through which we can understand how we got to where we are which i think is what marion was hoping for that whole time so marion good show old chap but you know what if you're going to be stuck in your house all day long for 35 years recording stuff you might want to make sure you have some good food to eat so in that case i can recommend today's sponsor hellofresh not only does hellofresh deliver farm fresh food to your door so you never have to go out shopping for it they give you everything you need to prepare chef curated meals that'll knock your socks off like that's what's great about it is that even if you can't cook 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all right thanks to hellofresh for supporting this video and a huge shout out to patreon supporters the answer files on patreon that are helping get the lights on helping me grow a team and just being awesome forming a little great community i love you guys there's some new names we need to murder real quick we've got andrew de tesla uh hidden i just said hidden uh scott simpson matthew dull andrew p n j j moffatt simon hunt gary gomez aaron alfinger kevin reynolds brendan gorier mbcme alec picard lucas hartsrow stacy ceda david and sarah delgado meet popsicle fry nexus and madri paiser i think i got that right thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos exclusive live streams and all kinds of cool stuff you can go to patreon.com answerswithjoe please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you'll like this one and as marion stokes knows they're watching you uh but you might like that you might like any of the others that are recommended down there they have my face on them and if you do enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday and that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 378,729

Rating: 4.9484515 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: sgVdZDFGqcs

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Lay_Z]

It’s great that this lady’s obsession could help to preserve this part of history, but it looks like the progress in digitizing the tapes is at a standstill. The clock is literally ticking as these tapes degrade, which would waste all of that effort she put in to protect the information they contain.

[u/Commodore256]

Marion Stokes in a nutshell:

Why be a Data Hoarder when you can be the Data Hoardest?

[u/Commodore256]

I don't know why she didn't switch to Hi-8 in 1989, that would have saved so much space