方 璐 FANG LU

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. 

In Walter Benjamin’s text “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, Benjamin analyzes the transition from storytelling to novel to information. The idea of storytelling is an ability of exchange experience; it comes to its end and replaced by the rise of information because experience has fallen in value; between the transition of the two is novel (Benjamin, Hale Anthology, P362). Reminiscent in Benjamin’s essay written in the 1960s, storytelling is a wisdom and craftsmanship, it weaves counsel and wisdom into fabrication of real life; but this craftsmanship vanished in the age of technology. This is evident by the replacement of modern vocal communication by other forms of media. Benjamin states the symptom of the process creates a new form of communication — information. Now, in the twenty first century, when Benjamin’s statement still remains a certain truth, we also witness another form of communication that is progressing on the Internet that is the woven combination of information and personal experiences into current information as with blogging and vlogging. In the age of information technology, the saturation of information exchanges, experience exchanges did not decrease as Benjamin predicated. It is now multiplied and expanded to another level so that one’s experiences exist in the integration of other cultural phenomena and collection on the web.

The emergence of text blogs and especially video blogs retrieves a hybrid storytelling. The difference between storytelling and information, as Benjamin states, is the former constructs experience and latter delivers values. Looking through the index page of one of the most popular video blog websites, www.youtube.com, users are allowed to upload and watch videos through personalized categories such as “Today’s Featured Video.” In this category, there are videos like “Davey with a Ball,” “Rock Climbing,” “Hello from Central Park NYC Blizzard of 2006,” and “Knife Skills”. From these self-explanatory titles, one sees large amounts of non utilitarian materials are published, watched, shared and commented by hundreds and thousands of people. One of the better examples of such material on video blogs that gains major popularity is a group of two Chinese boy (from my hometown of Guangzhou, China, who I coincidentally curated a video screening with in January 2006) who made their names by lip synching popular songs in their school dormitory and recorded their absurd comedy performance with a web cam. Their most popular performance is when they mimicked the Back Street Boy’s song, “As Long As You Love Me.” This is also where they derived their performance name from as the Back Dormitory Boys. These two Chinese boy have been consistently creating these music videos in the past two to three years and are now one of the most popular International Internet groups. Through these overly superficial imitations and the embodying of their mundane student life in the identity of popular icons, they achieved to establish a temporal model of their own on the blog community. There are now several groups continuing in their foot steps in this kind of making.

These are only some examples represent the larger community. Internet, Blogging, Vlogging are still young; it is still early to define their impact on all levels. But the viability of the technology has changed our experience sharing and essentially reformed the making of experience.