Broadcast Yourself：A Short Essay on Video Blogs
By the end of 20th century, blogging, an on-line group activity initiated as a form of ‘web diary’ has gained major popularity among the public. Now that large communities have greater access to internet, blogging allows for anyone to become a writer and publisher; the position of sender and receiver is constantly changing. The result of such activity has changed the immediacy of news and enhanced one’s agency within the larger sociopolitical system. The new child of blogging, the “video blog,” also called “Vlog,” is created within the infrastructure of blogging. Instead of using text or still images, it uses moving images as communication method. The content of these videos are ranging from personal life to segments of popular TV, movies and commercials, to news, sports, and politics. While the topics of content remains similar in blogs and vlogs, the transition from text to image has lead to a leap from quality to quantity in the history of moving images. The practice of using video blogs threatens video as a professional art form as the greater public is encouraged into this particular type of production making. In a global perspective it contributes to a multidimensional communication. (more…)