Richard BF

Videoblogging theoretics, being the media, and the completely improvised future of a world currently without rhyme, reason or good beetroot fertiliser.

Lives on hold

Thursday, 22^nd December 2005 - 5:45pm (AEST)

Permalink • # • Comments(2) • Categories: Blog/Vlog theory, Culture, Video

I'm not a fan of still photography, particularly in "olden times", when most photographs were posed for. I don't like modern posed photos either (he says, noticing the posed shot of himself on his website), but that's fine, as we have other methods for documenting history.

Looking at old "posed for" photographs, I can't even start to visualise what life must have been like. The body poses are all put on, as are the faces, all those happy smiling faces. I find it hard to believe that everyone was happy in the early 20th century. It's like watching professional models in an advertisement for Versace or Coca Cola, everyone's happy, everyone's beautiful... and everyone's jacked up on speed and Cocaine, which they well could have been back in the 1800s when it was all legal, and the most famous poems in history were all drug induced. I'm starting to ramble...

Anyway, I've done photography rants to death already, so I'm not going to do that again. But I am going to point out that this is one of the reasons why videoblogging is so cool. A lot of it is real people in real situations, not acting, not putting on anything, just doing the real stuff they do, and being passionate about it.

In 100 years, our successors will look back at the massive amount of real media documenting real people, and although it won't be like being here, it will be pretty damn exciting being able to view audiovisual representations of hundreds of years in the past. Imagine if we could see crystal clear (digital) quality video of Napoleon, King Henry VIII, that peasant guy from London who shovels shit off the cobblestones each week, or even a videoblog from a convict sent to Australia in the late 1700s.

This video is a snapshot of real people wasting real time.

Play the enclosure: livesOnHold127.mov (5.9 MB)

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"A lot of it is real people in real situations, not acting, not putting on anything, just doing the real stuff they do, and being passionate about it."

My usual argument against this position is that, particular as regards personal videoblogging, the moment the videoblogger becomes his or her own subject there's an abstraction, a splitting of the self, as they become a dual subject-observer. Videoblogging is *not* like being there, because people don't perform for a potentially global audience when they're not videoblogging (they only perform for the person or people they're with). I don't doubt that many videobloggers *don't* perform, ever, but there's essentially no way of knowing.

But, then (and now I'm the one who's rambling), I suppose you could say that split selves are par for the course in this day and age and that, as a result, videoblogging *is* like being there. The point being that there's no such thing as reality, or least no reality beyond that which is constructed and constructs us, in these videos or anywhere else.

posted by Matt at 8:05pm on Thursday, 22^nd December 2005

While I'm happy to get philosophical, as existentialism and life acting are personal favourites of mine, but now we're starting to get beyond videoblogging. My argument would be, as you say, that it is par for the course in this day and age, as it is becoming similarly with privacy. People are starting to ignore the presence of cameras. And most videobloggers I think, in another of your points, end up as more extroverted people, or at least develop some basic improvisational life skills, which in turn they take into their real lives.

I don't think I'm much different on camera than off, in fact its pretty much the same. The only real difference is that the majority of my personal videos are doctored truths for dramatic effect, but I usually don't let on. Lucky this is buried inside a comment. :-)

posted by Richard BF at 9:53pm on Thursday, 22^nd December 2005

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