Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

So it is surprising that the media-aware Labour Party has not made a move to reign in this new media, in fact it has studiously ignored or remained rather ignorant of its possibilities. Instead, the old-fashioned stodgy British Conservative party seems to have jumped on the new media bandwagon and actively leapfrogged the old media approach of Labour. Moving straight into the new media world of Internet video diaries, or videoblogs, Web 2.0 and grassroots narrowcasting. In fact it is telling to what extent Labour have missed the entire new media juggernaut ? the blogging community, for example, being decidedly off-message.

Trine and David Berry wrote an article on the Conservative leader David Cameron's use of web video. I missed it last month when it was published online. It's a nice run down of communication in British politics in a bite-sized format and it is all the more relevant considering Blair's resignation today.

The article poses some good questions that can bear deeper research. I'm hoping someone picks up where Trine leaves off. What caught my eye was the concept of authenticity. As the article points out Cameron creates authenticity (and there's no doubt it's orchestrated) through the use of hand-held camera, rouch edits and a lack of titles sequences, music or credits (example).

What is fascinating is the trend among videobloggers where authenticity is sought after using the complete opposite strategy (High Definition recordings, professional lighting equipment, fancy title sequences and credits with titles like ‘Director” and so on). If nothing else it is amusing that Cameron is trying to mimic the genre that a large group of videobloggers is trying to eliminate by themselves mimicking the television genre. It does pose additional questions regarding the motivations for seeking one strategy or the other among politicians and videobloggers alike.

Why does the politician think he needs to mimic YouTube videos to seem authentic? Maybe easy to guess. Why do the videoblogger think he needs to mimic the production values of a television broadcast to gain the same authenticity? Maybe not so easy to guess.

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.

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.

I'm doing my final project at the graduate program for Communication about videobloggers and their viewers. As a part of that project I have created a survey that I hope any videobloggers or videoblog viewers will fill out. Go to The Great Videoblogger Documentation '06 website to do so. It will only take you 10-15 minutes and I promise you eternal gratitude.

In a temporary fit of insanity I have vowed to do a cat vlog if I get 250 responses, and to film myself talking to the camera if I get 500 responses. I hope that videobloggers will blog about this survey, as I think that's the only way I can reach my goals.

Feel free to contact me at ahpe01@hum.aau.dk if you have any questions.

Look closely. The video on the left is not a vlog (an un-vlog), the video on the right is a vlog. At least Michael Verdi thinks so. I strongly believe that it is very silly to think that whether something was made in a commercial setting or not is the determining factor. I do agree that whether something is made with conversation in mind is a determining factor. The two are not mutually exclusive. This is a longer discussion, but there's no time for it now. Richard and Raymond also have commentary.

As an additional excercise look at the analogy below. On the left you see something that is not a photo, on the right you see a photo.

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

I just listened to the very first Eric Rice Media Saturday, or rather I participated. During tonight's videobloggers' videoconference Eric showed a quick glimpse of what he calls the Epsilon Construct. The whole thing needed more explaining and Eric promised to set up an audio stream (ie. a radio broadcast) so he could explain everything. It turned into more than just listening to Eric in my media player. I could follow along on the photo, people were IM'ing Eric with questions, Raymond phoned in with comments and we had an IRC channel (#vloggercon on Freenode) with six people. All that made it much more than radio (and much more valuable in the learning enviroment it was set in).

The liveness of the whole deal was very appealing. I hope Eric turns this into a regular thing. A topic a week, an hour or so of listening and discussing. It's got the usual drawbacks of being live, like the fact that you actually have to be somewhere at a specific time to play. But that's also a welcome break sometimes from the asynchronus nature of blogging. Getting that immediate feedback is very cool, and I hope I'll get to participate in more of that kind of stuff as a supplement to my blog reading.

As for the construct? I've got issues with parts of it, but that's for another day (like tomorrow).

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.

I'm a student, and they make students write papers. This semester I wrote a semiotic analysis of weblogs and videoblogs. It's an attempt at defining the two media — mostly because I couldn't get my head around them. My paper was due before Christmas, but I've been holding out putting it up for download becuase I haven't been graded for it yet. Of course now I realize that my paper will be available in the university project database regardless so I might as well host it here also.

• Download “Videoblogging Is... en tekstanalyse af weblogs og videoblogs” (705KB; 28 pages)

The paper is in Danish and it is a school paper, not a paper for a journal (so some boredom is to be expected). The version linked above is the same I turned in, missing words and grammatical mistakes included. I know they're there and you don't have to tell me about them (it's too late to fix anyway). If you quote this, let me know. I like reading about weblogs and videoblogs.