Re: fwd from parriska -Re: [-empyre-] some questions about vogs



At 12:44 +1000 21/6/02, empyre-admin wrote:
in terms of production, we (oh... damn.. by "we," i mean the kinds of people
who are likely to stumble on to the internet), are more textually literate
than visually literate.

nope. was once, but with flash (and as far as i'm concerned this is the only reason flash reached critical mass) all those graphically skilled people who are more visually than textually literate found their canvas. this is my indirect point in another post. flahs artists now think they're writers and writers think they're flash artists. there's a lot of hypertext writing that has flash which would benefit enormously if the flash was done *collaboratively* with a graphic artist. and vice versa. so i think this divide is diluted.


but yeah, html is good for the textually literate. except as you point out below (and as your blogs illustrate) one of the big things in blogging (for instance) is visual design, and this is a big thing in html (as far as i can see it's the only reason to use a wysiwyg tool to write pages, if it's just text, then use a text processor and save as html...). it is the word as design.

we produce text on a far more regular basis than we produce images (...i
can't believe i'm saying this... text does of course have a visual
component. but again, it's the perception that's key. with a very few
exceptions, as has been noted here, most people see text as transparent.)
it's something we can do without a great deal of self- consciousness.  so
even if i could easily master the vog production apps so that it was
technically as quick and dirty for me to post a video as to post to my blog
(... you know, i'm going to have to be convinced on this one. ), my lack of
fluency in image-making means that it would be a long time before i could
just spew something off the top of my head to my vog as i sometimes do with
my blog.

yeah, maybe. depends though. html has been around for 8 or 9 years. blogs for 5 perhaps, but blogs as we think of blogs now for no more than 3. so whichever way we slice it it took a while to figure blogging out on the web. in other words even with all our text literacy it took time to 'master' blogs.


so perhaps it's the same with vogs. i'd also approach it in a similar way. imagine a domestic video camera and a consumer macintosh. in terms of hardware that's the lot. imagine shooting a couple of minutes a day and spending just a little while in imovie cutting it down to 2 minutes (when i started vogging i had a personal rule, maximum of 2 hours work per vog, otherwise it was too far from being a blog). then putting that on a web page and integrating any text into the movie. what would you shoot, show, and write? i reckon much like how you learn to blog it evolves over time and it won't be long before you've got a vog 'voice'. :-)

please understand, i'm not saying this is a bad thing. after all, i work in
MOOs, and people are constantly throwing the learning curve in my face.
i sympathize, but i do argue there, and i think the case could be made here
too, that if we're going to see new modes of expression emerge in the new
media, we're going to need to stretch ourselves a bit. and that might
require some effort. and a little blood.

oh, i'm hoping to have vogs in a moo (i wanted to take this guest spot into a moo actually to show and have a real time conversation about vogs, still happy to do it if people interested). and yes, to be moosavvy there is alearning curve, and it's another medium that privileges text literacy too (moos are a very sophisticated sort of literacy particularly the punning that goes on).


and stretching yes, one day soon i hope to have a class where they will vog. and i'm interested to see what happens.

nice questions and great ideas. anyone wanna see some vogs in a moo? (and what planet are we from to even have such a sentence?)

cheers
adrian miles
--
+ lecturer in new media and cinema studies [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+ interactive desktop video developer [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+ hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]






This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.