a little pro vlog tirade

I’ll preface this post by admitting that I have not “read” many vlogs. In fact, I may know the URLs to only two, but it’s a medium that I find pretty interesting. I’ve always loved the mixture of media, and combining video on a blog seems like a good idea to me.

This post is prompted by an email I received today, a forward from Lisa, about vlogs. I’ll post the email in its entirety (links included) here (the email is actual a post on Alec Saunders .LOG):

At the risk of a little pedantry, here are the six pillars of blogging from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations:

1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2. Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6. Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.

Video fails.

It isn’t linkable. Oh yes, you can link to a video, like any other web page. But how does one, from within a video blog entry, link out to another site? How does one link into a video blog entry? How can you easily quote from a video blog entry? You can’t. The content is monolithic and opaque.

Because the content is opaque, it’s not searchable. You couldn’t build Google Blog Search, or techmeme around video blogs. Both rely on an understanding of the content, and it’s relationship to others in the blogosphere.

As a result, it’s a far less social and a far less viral medium than a blog.

Is a cat a dog? An apple an orange? No way. And neither is a vlog a blog.

So, Rob Hyndman, there’s no risk of turning blogging into TV. Vlog’s ain’t blogs.

Television’s idealists had grand ideas about the potential of their new medium, only to see television become… well, television. We run the same risk with video on the internet, in part due to the democratization of the process. It’s now so cheap to create video content for the internet that anyone can do it. And, oh, how we are!

The problem is this: one of the points made repeatedly in this debate is that some people may feel more comfortable with video rather than the written word. Written words can be difficult to use effectively. Proponents of video feel that being released from the strictures of the written word will allow ordinary people to communicate more freely, and more effectively. Blarney! Communicating effectively is difficult, whether the medium is video, text, or audio. Brad Templeton, in the comments on his blog, says it best when he admonishes people to remember their audience:

People should not do video because they think it will be less work for them than taking the time to write well. And even if they will put in more work, they should remember the added cost to the viewer in time. They must make it worth it.

Amen.

I suspect that for most people, myself included, the majority of video on the network today isn’t worth watching. It’s just not good communication.

While I believe that Saunders is correct about the limitations of vlogs (mainly that their content is not as easily searchable or can be broken apart, quoted, and linked from), I think his discussion here is limited in a few ways:

Saunders is privileging one definition of blog over another. Why use Scoble and Israel’s definition? Why not Gurak et al’s (from Into the Blogosphere):

blogs are best described as web sites that are updated frequently, most often with links to other sites and commentary on the other sites’ content. The content of blogs combine musings, memories, jokes, reflections on research, photographs, rants, and essays, though we would argue that it is not the nature of the content that defines it. Blogs can be devoted to only one topic, or they can reflect what the author is interested in at any given time. They can have one author—authors of blogs are known as “bloggers“—or multiple authors. What characterizes blogs are their form and function: all posts to the blog are time-stamped with the most recent post at the top, creating a reverse chronological structure governed by spontaneity and novelty.

Or we could look at Will Richardson’s definition from Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts:

In the most general sense, a Weblog is an easily created, easily updatedable Website that allows an author (or authors) to publish instantly to the Internet from any Internet connection…. [T]hey are comprised of reflections and conversations that in many cases are updated every day (if not three or four times a day). Blogs engage readers with ideas and questions and links. They ask readers to think and to respond. They demand interaction. (17-18)

Richardson also cites the presence of links and comments as important to blogs (18-19).

So, Saunders (rightly) announces that, based on Scoble and Israel’s definition, vlogs are not blogs. However, this is flawed because we could use other definitions of blogs. Looking at Gurak et al’s, we see that a vlog can easily:

• be updated frequently
• have “links to other sites and commentary on the other sites’ content”
• “combine musings, memories, jokes, reflections on research, photographs, rants, and essays, though we would argue that it is not the nature of the content that defines it”
• “be devoted to only one topic, or they can reflect what the author is interested in at any given time”
• “have one author … or multiple authors”
• have time-stamped posts “with the most recent post at the top”

Looks like, for example, Steve Garfield’s Video Blog (which Wikipedia cites as an early vlog), and it appears to meet all those criteria set by Gurak et al. I think it meets Richardson’s definition as well.

Of course, Garfield’s blog has text, not just videos. Another vlog, Chasing Windmills, has only videos and is less interactive with other sites (i.e., has fewer links elsewhere and commentary on other sites). Does this make it not a blog? Are the authors of Chasing Windmills merely using blogware as information management software and not actually maintaining a blog? Richardson would describe Chasing Windmills, I think, as “Reflective, metacognitive writing on practice without links. (Complex writing, but simple blogging, I think.[…])” (32). And I agree. It’s simple blogging.

But why the fuss? Why would Saunders bother to resort to criteria to denounce something as not a blog? (He even goes so far as to write, in a comment, I didn’t set the criteria. You can thank Scoble and Shel for that one.) This question sounds familiar to me, because it gets asked a lot. The question comes down to, does this text that feels new fit into this genre? Does this new type of book fit as fiction or nonfiction? Does this new type of movie count as a documentary or a drama?

So, we get new genres, and we try to force them into other genres. When we don’t like something, and we tend to privilege a genre (as Saunders privileges blogs), we’re likely to exclude it from that genre. Thus, Saunders finds an arbitrary definition of blogs that discounts vlogs and uses it. I am not saying Saunders did this maliciously. I am sure he likes the definition of blogs he uses. It is, admittedly, a good definition. But it is arbitrary. And exclusive. And, more to the point of this rant, it’s pointless. What does it matter if a vlog is a blog? It only matters if one wants to exclude something he dislikes from a genre he likes. That’s why traditional critics might not be so fond of putting, say Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s or Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, into the genre of novel. They kind of fuck with the genre rules.

I’ll agree with Saunders that most of the video online today is not worth watching. I’ll admit that watching vlogs is time consuming, especially those video posts that are more than five minutes. I don’t have the patience for it. I agree that blogs won’t be overtaken by vlogs, but not because “Vlog’s [sic] ain’t blogs.” I think vlogs are blogs, but blogs remediate (to draw from Brooks, Nichols, and Priebe) other genres: the journal, the newsletter, the diary, the video, the story, the postcard, the letter, etc.; and they’ll continue to remediate various genres, mixing, blurring, and clashing those genres, video and non-video text included.

Which means, to sum up my inarticulate rant, that we use different types of communication for different reasons. Yes, Saunders values text more than video. Hey, so do I, really. But I have to admire some video for what it does, and admit that often, it does it better. So, I guess rather than dis a whole type of media (vlog), I’d ask him to look at each situation and determine whether the media/genre/stylistic choices of the author/creator/artist work to convey the message.

Cited:

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2006.