Where the Internet Lives is a podcast and mini-documentary series about the unseen world of data centers. Our objective is to demystify data centers and dig into issues around data centers, such as what benefits they bring to the world by providing the internet, Al, and Cloud-based services to scientists, cities and individuals, and what challenges they face that require innovation, such as energy and water consumption.
Our documentary series sought to bring humanity to data and show how individual activists, analysts and innovators are striving every day to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.
As communities all over the world grapple with extreme weather, natural resource protection, food security, and protecting public health, the role of data centers is more important than ever.
A number of data pioneers at Google are bringing data into the hands of policymakers, grassroots organizations, and individuals who are using it in easy, natural ways to tell stories, inform policies and programming, and increase transparency to solve problems like hunger, food waste, deforestation, climate financing, grid reliability, health and safety. Google’s data center infrastructure makes these tools powerful and accessible to all.
Our accompanying films put a human face on data, each one focusing on a single person making a difference in the world through their use of data. Our stories show we can use data and AI responsibly to help solve some of the world's greatest challenges. Our hope is to that these stories give hope.
In our trailer, you can see highlights from each of our films wovern together to create anew shorter narrative.
Narrative is king and the films showed the struggles and the victories of the human beings behind the technology in emotional and meaningful ways. We saw their childhoods and their children. We saw the friendship and the fondness our characters forged by collaboration on audaciously ambitious projects.
Beyond the depth of the characters and capturing and selecting the right material, and showing it at the right pace, the film team stretched itself to provide us pure visual delight. For example, the interview style the team employed is known as “Down the Barrel,” a documentary style made famous by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. This extra special more technically skilled approach made it possible four our audience to look our characters right in the eye and connect with them. The team shot the films in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The incredibly cinematic approach is something you simply do not often see in branded films This is the joy of working with artful filmmakers.
The humanity of the voices and the stories came through and these topics resonate. This is our most popular season yet and our pod episodes, trailer, and videos all together have reached more than 500, 000 downloads.
The trailer for our video series hit over 100,000 downloads. The combination of laying out obstacles and showing in a hopeful way how individuals are leveraging AI and data to overcome these challenges is incredibly inspiring and hopeful, from showing how a dedicated forest researcher is modeling new ways to predict wildfires to how 2 women, one from an environmental non-profit and one from Google, were able to launch a satellite into space to detect methane leaks from oil and gas companies to sharing the story of a data analyst at a food bank who has dedicated her life to solving hinger and food waste, these stories move hearts and minds. The quality of the both the narrative and the filming and editing has brought us more views and downloads than any other videos we have produced in past seasons for the Where the Internet Lives series.
