Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

When all the available resources and energies have been played up in an organism or in any structure there is some kind of reversal pattern. The spectacle of brutality used as a deterrent can brutalize. Brutality used in sports may humanize under some conditions, at least. But with regard to the bomb and retaliation as deterrent, it is obvious that numbness is the result of any prolonged terror, a fact that was discovered when the fallout shelter program was broached. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Routledge, 2001, pp. 33)

Written in 1964 during the Cold War, perhaps relevant still.

Those of us who showed up for VlogEurope a couple of days early had the chance to visit the TVBlob offices in downtown Milan to get a demonstration of the system and a discussion about the possibilities. All helped by the fact that Deirdré works at TVBlob and she didn't mind taking time of of her workday to entertain a group of videobloggers!

I've heard Deirdré mention TVBlob a handful of times, but the concept was a bit hard to grok for me without having seen the box. Thankfully they now have a demonstration video on the TVBlob website. Click the video link below the silly stock photo on the front page. The TVBlob box is like a regular set-top box… only it's two-way. So not only do you get to recieve digital signals, you can also send broadcast quality video to anyone else who has a box. It's like Triple Play that's actually interesting (do we call it Quadruple Play or Quintuple Play?).

What I like about TVBlob are the possibilities for one-to-one communication. Most of the videoblogs I watch I multitask around so I search for information around the video while I watch and that behaviour would be really hard to accomplish with a tv remote. Those are tasks the computer are really well suited for. I imagine that there is a large audience who “just want to watch” that would find comfort in a TVBlob setup. Thankfully we can move digital content around without effort so both groups can be accomodated without extra work.

But back to one-to-one. You can make direct video calls which is fun for the first week (although the group-to-group video calls that will appear as one living room calls another living room will be different that the single person scenarios we've seen fail on mobile phones). What's going to fun forever is the fact that you can splice in video from any input device into the call. So while I'm talking wih my mom on my Jetsons video phone I can send her video from my trip to Milan using my digital camera. I could even hook up my laptop to the TVBlob box and show her exactly how she marks messages as spam in her Thunderbird inbox. Actually it would be even more useful if she hooked up her computer to the TVBlob box to show me what her problem is. I know there are remote desktop utilities, but I just can't get them to work over the public internets. The box just has a standard analog input so you can connect pretty much any device. Camera, DVD player, computer, satellite reciever (mp3-player?). I'm really digging the extensibility of the box.

The biggest downside is that the box really puts a strain on your internet connection. Ideally you need around 1mbit upstream to send tv quality images. While I would be able to use it with my 1024/512 connection I wouldn't be able to send tv quality images across the network. I see that technical issue as one that will solve itself in time (ie. when the Danish telecoms get a grip).

PS. Madge Weinstein interviewed Deirdré during VlogEurope. There is TVBlob stuff in there as well. Not to mention talk about old lesbians so check it out.

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Richard clarified his view on photography and video. To mark the occasion I will post a quote by Roland Barthes from Rhetoric of the Image and pretend I have another 6 months to write a proper reply. Perhaps it's a red herring, a stalling technique. Hopefully it's food for thought.

[…] The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjuction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. […]

Yes, I had to look up stupefying. Next week: Why French authors prefer semi-colon over period and avoid commas altogether.

Richard BF just posted a blog entry called the definition of videoblogging. It's part summary, part exploration, part manifesto and completely worthwhile. I'm still not done discussion photography with Richard, but fortunately I agree with his take on videoblogging more than I agree with his take on photographs.

Be sure not to miss the video at the bottom of the blog post. Short, blue haired and unshaven; it's videoblogging incarnate.

Social Media is all the rage these days. Blogging, wikis, podcasting, everything 37signals touches, conversations at the hotdog stand gets lumped into this category of media that are social. Podcasting is probably included because it brings audio production to the masses, but that alone doesn't make a media social. After I posted my first tirade against podcasting Adrian Miles pointed out that the revolution in podcasting lies in access, not dialogue:

Otherwise it is nonbroadcast radio and the revolution is that community access is now equivalent to network access.

I'm actually listening to podcasts regularily now. I found a couple of Danish ones I like (Rasmus Rasmussen and Jakob Bøtter) and from there I've expanded into English language podcasts as well. All podcasters seem to have entered this competition to see how accurately they can make a representation of radio on the computer. Which is all fine of course — community access is nice — but community access doesn't automatically make the media social.

Almost two months ago Jakob Bøtter made an interview with Neville Hobson. I have been wanting to comment on it since I heard it, but I haven't because podcasts don't foster conversation:

• Podcasts are long (>5 minutes). Once I'm at the end I've forgotten half of the stuff I wanted to comment on.
• Podcasts don't contain links only occasional links in the accompanying blog post, which I may or may not see (see below).
• Long audio files are hard to quote. Just finding the right spot takes forever. I end up having to listen to the whole podcast again.
• The most popular podcasting subscription software (well, the one I use) don't give me a way to come from the podcast to the blog post where I can comment.

Obviously there is conversation going on around the podcasts so someone is talking. But podcasts are not social because of the way they use audio. Podcasts are social despite the way they use audio. Just as text had to rethought to become social, audio has to be rethought to become a social medium. Otherwise you just have radio on-demand. Taking the points above we can make a starting list:

• Short is easier to “do stuff” with. If you can't do stuff like comment, quote or reuse it's hard to be social.
• Links branch out the conversation.
• Subscription software needs to prominently displace a permalink. The permalink anchors the conversation in one spot. Without it there can be no commenting, quoting, reusing, social interaction.

Podcasting is well on it's way to become well established as a community-driven on-demand radio experience, and as such it's placed solidly as an offline medium. For that reason I suspect that the social version of audio will be known under a different name.

Previous installments in my podcasting saga:

• Podcasting Sucks
• Podcasting Still Sucks

A cable channel showed the brilliant movie One Hour Photo tonight, starring Robin Williams as the psychotic photo lab operator. I won't get into the tragedy of his character, but move on to a quote that stuck with me:

I'm sure my customers never think about it… but these snapshots are their little stands against the flow of time. The shutter is clicked… the flash goes off… and they've stopped time… if just for the blink of an eye. And if these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it's this… I was here. I existed. I was young. I was happy… and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture. Most people don't take snapshots of the little things… the used Band-Aid… the guy at the gas station… the wasp on the Jell-O… but these are the things that make up the true picture of our lives. People don't take pictures of these things.

Peter Harms Larsen writes about this registrering aspect of the photograph and the video in “Faktion som udtryksmiddel” (in Danish only, sorry):

Fotografiets — og senere filmens specifikke mekanisk-kemiske produktionsteknik (i modsætning til tegningens og maleriets subjektivt håndværksmæssige), medfører at disse nye billedfremstillinger på én gang registrerer en del af den synlige virkelighed nærmest som et måleinstrument, samtidigt med at de afbilleder den med en særlig realistisk mimesis. Vi får altså billeder hvis betydning består i en kombination af den indexikalske og den ikoniske tegnfunktion i forhold til den gengivne virkelighed.

And Adrian Miles makes the more or less obvious connection to blogging in “Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday”:

This 'everydayness' of blogging grounds practice in the lifeworld of the writer, and tends to assist in legitimating the blog in terms of its purchase upon the world. […] The notion of authenticity here is related to the indexical markers described, so that these texual markers operate much like the analog indexical relations evident in film. This is not to overstate the point, but it is to insist that when a blogger mentions a place, time, or person, such place, events and people do exist.

Richard BF somehow thinks that video has patented the registration of the everyday in videoblogging. He even says he doesn't like photography because it's posed (if that's not what he's saying I'm not understanding his dislike of photography). The difference between video and photography is not that one is somehow more real than the other — they are equally “posed” so to speak. The difference is simply that the photography freezes a blink of an eye in time, while the video records a series of blinks. I find this freezing in time very alluring, as it can show things the continuous recording cannot. They two are different, but to say that one is more real than the other would be a mistake.

Richard ended his post with a snapshot of real life. I suppose I should end with a photo snapshot from real life. Jenn took the photo, but I wish I had. The photo has frozen time at the right moment where Indie (the cute puppy) and the cow are looking at each other. That makes this blink of an eye much more powerful than a video of the event would have.

The main difference between blogging and traditional mass media lies in the amount of control the reciever has. Traditionally the reciepient has had very little control: Turn on radio, turn off radio. Look at poster, don't look at poster. This situation is different on (video)blogs. Here the reciepient has a great deal of control. By clicking through links the recipient controls the assembly of the parts that make up the physical text. The value of this shift should not be underestimated.

The “Text” is an abstract text — a combination of the physical signs created by different senders, assembled by the recipient and the sender's intension and the reciepient's reception/interpretation. Genre consists of predetermined norms and rules acknowledged by a discourse community. It influences the interpretation of the text, but only if both the sender and reciepient recognize a given genre. Since there are multiple senders the genre can shift quite dramatically as the Text is assembled.

The Medium, blog or videoblog, is the enviroment in which the communication occurs. Meaning is attached to the Medium and it is a target of interpretation just as the physical signs. The blog is characterized by a connectedness. Both a connectedness with other texts via links and a connectedness with the world it represents. This connectedness with the world it represents is especially apparent on videoblogs where the representation is a more immediate fit.

But most of all the blog is characterized by the fact that any recipient can also function as a sender. Access to the network is equal and the reciepient can provide content by posting comments or blog entries of his own thus becoming an influence in someone else's communication situation. These continually changing sender and recipient relationships makes it pointless at times to speak of sender and recipients on the general case — participants is a better word. This fluctuating relationship result in a living in the medium rather than a communication passing through the medium.

Jon gives a summary of a case of corporate blogging gone horrible wrong. In short The Danish Cancer Society messed up big time when launching two new weblogs (in lack of a better term). Jon points out that in the Danish blogosphere three factors make up a weblog:

• Features
• Interactivity
• Human voice

Interactivity is what differentiates the web from printed media. Jon and Jesper cover some aspects of interactivity with the term multivocality:

Refers to the multitude of voices participating in the creation of a weblog. By way of hyperlinking, commenting and trackbacks weblog readers in effect become secondary authors, this is the progression that induce multivocality. Multivocality, apart from depicting “many voices” is therefore the process that complicates the distinction between author and reader - blogs and blogging. As author and reader is constantly changing roles, they are in effect adding to an ongoing process - the weblog.

It is even more extreme than that. Readers who doesn't have blogs themselves or never write comments are still participating in an interactive enviroment.

When Adrian Miles describes hypertext as cinema's revenge on the word he has a good point. Weblog readers don't create meaning solely based on the contents of weblog entries, the real power lies in the link. Meaning is created based on how these individual pieces are joined — much in the same way that meaning in cinema is created not by the individual clips or scenes, but how these are combined into a whole. While authors have a role in limiting reader's potential choices for combination (it is, after all, the author who decided which links to put where) it is ultimately up to the reader to create his own individual cinematic travel through the blogosphere. That kind of reader empowerment is not to be underestimated.

Amy Gahran asks if first-person accounts can be journalism (via).

Can simple first-person accounts of newsworthy events that involve no additional reporting work or perspectives be considered journalism?

It's a non-question and it's sad to see this brought up as something new that has come as a result of the London bombings. Of course first-person accounts can be journalism. Why do you think a reporter is called a reporter? It was someone who went out and reported on the events for the people who wasn't there. The ‘reportage’ is a well-defined journalistic genre in Danish of which I can't seem to find an equivalent English term (‘report’ is too broad). These are accounts of event described in the first-person. Usually with more emotion than other types of articles. Their goal is to put the reader in the place of the journalist, so the reader can feel the event. See New Journalism for a radical example.

These first-person accounts rarely stand on their own. Often they are accompanied by other articles reporting the facts (or just an overview), because the first-person account can't deal with the facts as well. These days it's most common to see an article begin as a first-person account and then move into fact reporting.

First-person accounts in journalism are not new — The Massachusetts Spy published an eyewitness account of the first battle of the American Revolution. It is a given that they can be journalism, and I'm a little sad that this question is proposed as something new that the internet has created.

Adrian Miles' BlogTalk paper “Media Rich versus Rich Media (or why video in a blog is not the same as a video blog)” is online now. It's too late in the day to being reading it, but I will enjoy reading it over the course of this week. The paper is written in hypertext (though a long, single version is also available). Reading these hypertext papers is both very rewarding and very frustrating. As Adrian himself mentions during the introduction:

I recognise that this causes many anxieties for academic and casual readers, where a culture of exhaustive (that is complete) reading is the norm.

I kind of like the fact that I can take a paper like this, and start reading one day. When I'm done for the day I can just bookmark the last page I was at, and then continue the next. That way I can ‘swim” around the text for days, reading and re-reading. It's very fascinating, but at the same some I do have that anxiety that I am missing out on something. It's weird because I don't have the problem when I sit with today's newspaper — there I happily accept the fact that I won't be reading the whole thing.