vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Flash in the Pan

Luke from Lcubed is presenting at the Science Communicators meeting, they’ve got a ‘thirdway web’ business model that is web 2.0 for business. He’s doing a good job of filling in all the material that I sketched and skated over rather too abstractly. It is good to hear someone returning to some of the basic ideas of the web as a web. Been a while since I’ve been reminded of going through this like this, web as de facto broadcast paradigm to what I like to think of as a link ecology. He’s got some fantastic illustrations too, be good for classes.

The q and a afterwards proved interesting. I became unusually defensive, even irascible as the old chestnuts of trustworthiness and authority raised their heads. I think what got me so strongly onto my backfoot was that I was invited to talk about web 2, which I did, but to then want to have an argument about it just seemed, well, not what I was there for! I’m the guest, dammit. On the other hand I was in a room of science communicators and Luke and I sketched what communication looks like in this space – a space that all media is heading towards, so I didn’t actually get at the time why the resistance. I still don’t, but now I’m realising that it was resistance. Sorry everyone, you might not like it but it is a paradigm shift. I think they were shooting the messenger.

I remain bemused and shocked more than surprised by the conservativeness. I really did mean it when I described the tenor of the sentiment of the questions as being like in the Vatican sometime around 1450 and describing this new fangled printing press thing. Someone like me was saying “it will create religious and political revolution, it will lead to mass literacy, the novel, popular literature, and entirely new ways for knowledge to be made and shared” and the various Catholic knowledge experts could only see all the bad work that it would allow, and of course firmly believed that most of the cultured world would continue to come to their churches each morning to be told which way was up. As science communicators I figure they know which way that particular technological change went. But as science communicators I think there was a strong sense of threat, though this is not how it was described.

In retrospect it was like talking to a room of traditional journalists. I still vividly remember the senior journalism academic staff member telling me heatedly in a staff meeting circa 1995 that the “internet was a flash in the pan and we don’t have to teach it”.

So here’s a simple scenario. An organisation currently doesn’t allow staff to share information in the way many of us now take for granted. For the usual reasons. Fast forward ten years. Your new staff have blogged, Googled, flickred and put videos on YouTube throughout all their academic careers, much like we use our phones today. They are then told they can’t do any of this anymore. The organisation will have to change if it wants to keep staff, blogging and its ilk and its assumptions about knowledge creation and dissemination will be part of our daily fabric.

Screenscapes

From the editor’s introduction to the latest issue of Scan:

The proliferation of screens represents a signature feature of modern and contemporary life. Screens located on computer, cinema, television or mobile platforms offer possibilities for entertainment, communication, art, manipulation and monitoring, creating new forms of identity, community, expression and social control.

This issue is entitled “Screenscapes Past Present Future” and comes out of a 2007 University of Sydney conference.

Dull?

This blog has again descended into dullness. I’ve lost a sense of anyone reading it, which surprises me (not that the readership has declined, it is a simple feedback loop after all) as I wasn’t aware how strongly the experience of being aware and knowing my readers informed what I did here. Silly really.

So, time to strike out and let some life back in here. No idea just how, as I do my hamster routines as a middling academic in a middling university (no, that isn’t bitterness) with middling administrative responsibilities and abilities.

Tomorrow night I’m speaking to a group of science communicators (I think that’s how they’ve described themselves) on various webby (should that be webbie?) things. Video blogs, blogs, RSS, Web Two point Oh, that sort of stuff. It’s in a pub, over dinner and (I know) beers so I suspect having invited presenters just formalises the excuse for a group of science communicators to meet up once a month or so at a pub for a meal, a chat, and a beer. I don’t expect to have that information super highway running past my door, which means I’ll be relying on screen shots, but also means I won’t be able to jump in and show stuff if something interesting pops up. I’ll let you know how it goes.

VideoVortex 3

Straight from the email announcement:

Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition – Call for participation

On October 10-11 2008, Bilkent University Department of Communication and Design, in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures, will organise the 3rd Video Vortex event in Ankara, Turkey. Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition will feature a two-day international conference, evening program, live performances and new media art exhibition.

As video is becoming a significant form of personal media on the internet, this conference and new media event aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around the independent production and distribution of online video. We are witnessing the merging of television and the Internet at an unprecedented speed. Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition, similar to the former Video Vortex conferences, will contextualize the latest developments through presenting continuities and discontinuities in the artistic, activist and mainstream perspective of the last few decades. Unlike the way online video presents itself as the latest and greatest, there are long threads to be woven into the history of visual art, cinema and documentary production. The rise of the database as the dominant form of storing and accessing cultural artifacts, has a rich tradition that still needs to be explored. How will we navigate through continuous expanding spaces of moving images? Will there be a technological paradigm shift, and how will this shift be narrated? What responses do are artists, activists, filmmakers and media producers have to the dynamic and controversial world of online video? How are institutions, groups and individuals coping with the potentialities of freely distributed video content?

Themes of Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition will be: Navigating the database, p2p, art online, visual art, innovative art, participatory culture, social networking, political economy, collaboration and new production models, censorship & YouTube, collective memory, cinematic and online aesthetics.

Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition is an extension of the broader Video Vortex project by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Video Vortex Ankara is a follow-up to the Amsterdam conference, held in January 2008, and the Brussels conference, held in October 2007. It aims to continue and deepen the debates, while bringing together a wide range of scholars, artists and curators as well as lawyers, producers and engineers. At present, the organizers are in contact with Geoffrey Bowker, Donato Totaro, Jaromil, Steve Wilson, Vera Tollmann, Basak Senova, Angela Melitopoulos, Aras Ozgün and Michael Verdi, just to name a few.

We are currently finalizing the program and aim to start press release at the end of May. To keep up with our progress, please see http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex as well as the Video Vortex discussion list. Information about subscription to this list can be found at http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/videovortex_listcultures.org. The Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition website and blog, containing the latest information, will be online soon.

For inquiries regarding participation, contribution or submission of related works, please contact Andreas Treske at treske @ bilkent dot edu dot tr.

Scoutle

Too early for me to say just what I think about Scoutle, but I am utterly fascinated and intrigued by the model of defining my own ‘scouts’ that can have conversations on my behalf with other’s individuals scouts to find things or blogs that I might like to connect with, read, and so on. The level of agency in there, some sense of having agents spidering away, really appeals. It might be the autonomy. At first glance it seems the model is to have several scouts, since my first one doesn’t appear to be able to contain all my interests, you choose a large domain then interests within that, but it doesn’t appear that an individual scout can have more than one larger domain. So the first one is arts and entertainment. But I want one that is specifically for finding other researchers in things like hypertext, media studies, new media, video, and so on. At the moment the categories are broader. I’ll see how we go with the first one, and perhaps I’ll add more scouts to make a troop (they are scout troops, aren’t they?)

Rootclip

Rootclip is a video project where the site owners seed a video narrative by providing what I think is the opening minute. Anyone can then contribute the following minute and the community votes on which of those submitted is preferred. And so it continues. This is a community based sort of storytelling which, in terms of a narrative practice, is interestingly odd. If I paticipate then I can see all the possible versions for the current chapter, but once the decision has been made these possibilities are gone. To this extent it is very similar to traditional cinema editing and narrative – prior to an edit all the stuff in the trim bin is available, and once the edit is committed then the sequence is fixed. Another interstitial form, collaborative, some possible notion of community, with the production of an indeterminate narrative during composition. So improvisation in some manner would seem to be important here.

Fun Cam

Got this from Daniel. This is interesting. The rush action camera. Not just because it is a low tech possibly decent camera that you can just put anywhere, but also the interface they have between the lens and capture and the watch as screen. It has the potential to be a very simple (and so very useful for low rez media practices) way to go about video blogging.

Begin and Keep Going

Roger Ebert via Mark Bernstein:

I would begin a story time and time again on an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter, ripping each Not Quite Great Lead from the machine and hurling it at the wastebasket. [Bill] Lyon watched this performance for a couple of weeks and gave me two of the most valuable pieces of writing advice I have ever received: (1) Once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going? (2) The Muse visits during creation, not before. Don’t want for inspiration, just plunge in.

Writing Processes

This week in the honours studio most of the workshop was taken up with a simple, but surprisingly interesting exercise. Each of us (myself included) described a problem we encountered in doing our writing (everyone is working up a 5000 draft of what will hopefully be the opening of their thesis or exegesis). The problems ranged from needing to plan first, difficulties in knowing if what is being written will be relevant, difficulties in being concise or relevant, stylistic repetition, spending too much time proofing and making things right before writing more, confusion about what ends up relevant or included in the exegesis, being over organised so feel like can only write if have large blocks of time, procrastination where always being distracted and only spending a small amount of the time actually writing, having too many ideas at once and not knowing where to start, struggling forever to find a first sentence (and not being able to write until that first sentence is there), and finally needing to find the essence of the writing and struggling through a lot of writing and not liking the writing until this essence begins to emerge.

We then discussed ways to address these problems. What was interesting was that all of us had problems and in the majority of cases these are quite easily addressed by (a) first recognising what lies within or under the problem, and then (b) having a strategy that either addresses or acknowledges that.

For example, needing to plan first is simple, create the plan then write to it. Relevance is a tricky one, but one of the biggest issues is honours is simply developing the discipline of writing, so it is much more valuable to be writing regularly, on stuff in the field (more or less), than not having the discipline of writing at all. For those who try to make things perfect before moving on, free writing can be very useful, both as a tool to get writing, and also to force yourself to let go of being perfect if this keeps slowing you down. For those who have to have everything just so before writing, it seems you are usually hyper organised, or at least into lists and those sorts of things. Here we talked about putting things like ‘doing the dishes’, ‘tidy my desk’, and ‘clean my room’ as things on your list that you get to tick off and do as part of your writing routine. That way instead of sitting down and then deciding you can’t write until the dishes are done, and so on (which becomes deferral and procrastination) this gets incorporated into the writing activity. (Of course it will be interesting to see if other things then pop up that just have to be done before you can start writing.) Some who write then just do other stuff, are what I call ‘burst writers’ (I’m one). For these people it really is a recipe for frustration if things are approached based on time. It is much more productive to set word quantities, for instance ‘write 200 words’ rather than ‘write for 2 hours’. As a burst writer the 200 words come easily, then go off and do all those sorts of things that you do instead of writing for half an hour or so, then do another 200 words. You end up with more words, less stress, and feel more productive. Finally, when there are just too many ideas floating around writing is the only way to actually make sense of things. In my own practice I would move towards hypertext to manage this idea of connectedness and simultaneity, but when not using hypertext generating a list of sub headings (keywords, a word cloud, a brain storm) and then just writing, somewhere between free and structured writing, under each of these, is enough to begin to sculpt.

In all of this I remain fascinated by writing as the site of a particular sort of practice.

Video, Blogging, Ads

Yet more evidence that video on the web is television. Via Inside Online Video we have the Interactive Advertising Bureau setting guidelines for ads in online video, while also mentioning Videorix, one of a growing band of services all about getting ads into your videos.

This just helps push audience aggregation into an area where it has no right being, and once again mistakes audience quantity with the qualitative publishing, video creating and writing we can do online. Yes, you don’t have to use these services, but this is where the traffic goes and becomes the hegemonic normalised and normative form for what video online will be. Petit TV. The mediocrity of the vision is despairingly impressive.