Video Blogging vs Video vs Television? Still no definition needed!
It is quite obvious that humans have an addictive relation to defining things. That’s just the way we work: We want to know: are we dating or seeing each other. We want to classify: is it a boy or a girl. To possess: this land is my land, I don’t know where yours is. To label; tag and outsmart; to know better and to go deeper. We want to place our tags and labels and if only for the reason that we would not forget.
Yes. There is a price involved that definitions make us pay for. When we start defining what videoblogging is at a state when the technology (and practice) is still nascent, we risk to come early. There are some laws of creation and invention: Making and doing, thinking and searching, videoblogging and dancing, all sorts of cultural practices follow the same scheme: If we define what we do too early we end up in the classification of styles and have to ask one another for permissions to cross borders. And as we know of, permissions ask for bureaucracy and administration.
Once we have limited ourselves and categorized, we have a hard time to get back into the creative field of invention; it’s time for experts and specialists now and along with them for commissions and juries to distribute means resourcefully. Once we defined things and spelled them out it’s hard to go back. People pay all sorts of money and invest big time into creative writing, counseling and improvisation just to get out of a routine that started capturing our mind and turning us old and immobile at a fairly young age.
I admire Adrian Miles seminal work on video blogging and his theory casts as well as his role as a precursor of reflecting the characteristics and possibilities of video regarding its potential for interactivity. Yet his classification of video blogging as being completely dependent on an interactive mode goes heuristically too far. It starts scrutinizing the bathing water before the child is quite soaked.
Emile Zola showed us in “Au Bonheur des Dames” that the perfect ware house lives from disorder rather than by providing a well sorted classification of its inventory. Disorder instigates consumption and thus increases profits. Lack of classification instigates our mind and inspires the production of art. – Searching for milk and sugar in a store where I have never set foot in makes me find all sorts of things, regardless how necessary they are or not. Confusion is a warrant for an active mind (and wallet). Our synapses are on a party and are firing our heads off. We celebrate a thousand findings and enjoy the time of living beyond fences.
We have to get messy if we want to produce. If we define things too early we jeopardize the innovative potential that they carry along and videoblogging has quite a bit of it. So if we want to define what videoblogging is, we should rather be positive than negative and say what it could be or what it may become some day in the future; and not, what it should not be or what it is not. Or, for a change, we could just continue our practice and keep on doing it.
