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The famous “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” video clip of University of Florida student Andrew Myer at a John Kerry speech is maybe not exactly what it seems. Or, at least, the video doesn’t tell the whole story. Maybe not even half of it.

Positively shocking, isn’t it?

Writing in the Chistian Science Monitor today, Dennis Jett, Dean of the International Center at the University of Florida, sheds new light on the whole incident in a piece that is aimed at criticizing the media’s handling of the story.

What the video doesn’t show, and what went largely unreported in the first days after the video hit the web, is the fact that Myer had caused a disturbance earlier in the day on the campus (with promises of more to come that night at the Kerry speech). Even more important, however, is the fact that Myer had already disrupted the Kerry speech even before the beginning of the now famous video clip.

Jett writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

What was not on the YouTube videos was the fact that the student disrupted the speech twice. After Kerry had responded to numerous questions, I announced that one final one would be taken from the microphone on my right. The student then grabbed the microphone on the left and loudly demanded that he be allowed to ask a question. When a female police officer intervened and tried to escort him out, he broke away and continued shouting. At that point, Kerry said he would take the student’s question, but would respond first to the questioner who was supposed to have been last. As he finished answering that question the famous videos began.

As I mentioned long ago, video adds a natural credibility to a “report.” If you are seeing something with your own eyes, it makes it hard to question its veracity. Because of this, the potential for distortion actually becomes greater.

And so as more and more vloggers take up the role of “citizen journalist,” we are likely to see more and more distortion. Some of this distortion will be intentional; some will be unintentional.

Jett rightly criticizes the mainstream media for not getting out all the facts. Most simply jumped on a vlogger’s video from YouTube and ran with it “as is.”

The mainstream media could take this incident as a lesson for how to handle “news” in this video blogging era, but something tells me that most probably won’t. At least not for a while.

While that is most certainly a criticism of “professional journalism” today, it has to be said that we, the consumers of the news, are also culpable. Our insistence on having everything now! now! now! is what leads us to take the first version of a story as the only version. It seems we simply don’t have the patience to wait out the truth.

If we get our news from YouTube or other such sites with “user generated content,” we shouldn’t be surprised when we learn we didn’t actually get the whole story. Sadly, some of us won’t ever learn we never got the whole story. Even sadder, some of us won’t even care.

LINKS:

Jett’s Piece at the Christian Science Monitor

Official University of Florida Report on the Incident

The Myanmar government, dealing with the country’s most intense political unrest in the last twenty years, is closing off access to international media organizations. Local video bloggers, however, are taking up the slack.

Local vloggers are using whatever means they can find to get their video out to media organizations and websites such as YouTube. As the government attempts to limit internet access, the citizen journalists have had to resort to using proxy servers and satellite phones (traditionally quite expensive - these are not simply everyday cell phones).

With an internet penetration rate at less than 1%, the country was hardly a mecca for technology even before the recent crack down by the government. In addition, cell phones (especially cell phones with video) are beyond the means of many ordinary citizens.

Still, they are getting their video out. Journalists from traditional media outlets are said to be vetting it for accuracy.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the phenomenon.

You can see a sample of the types of vlogs that are coming out of the country below.

According to this article at infoworld.com, Macromedia’s “technology agenda is focused on boosting Web-based video experiences.” This from the horse’s mouth (that is Macromedia) at the Flashforward2005 conference.

There’s some good news here for vloggers, of course. Flash is already a nice way to present video for a vlog (video blog), or other uses. Now that Macromedia is making it a top priority, it can only mean another good option for your vlog. All aspects of vlogging, from making the vlog, to putting it together, getting it out on the web, and viewing it in various different vlog viewers - be they a desktop computer or a mobile phone, should only get more sophisticated, if not easier.

Read more

As some mainstream, online newspapers begin to take on certain qualities of blogs, it will be interesting to see whether the websites for TV stations begin to take on some qualities of vlogs. Of course one of the main problems in trying to predict whether this situation will pan out or not is the fact that vlogs currently don’t have much in the way of standardized qualities for a TV station to copy or not. It’s so early in the time of the vlog that the practices that will become common haven’t really been determined yet - apart from anything a vlog has already inherited from the blogosphere.

Read more

In this opinion piece by Guam journalist, Jason Salas, titled Participatory journalism and the inevitable death of newspapers, the author makes some good points about the changing media in our world and the need for media outlets to allow for more interaction if they’re to stay successful. Predicting the death of traditional newspapers, he writes:

Audiences in the Age of Information aren’t satisfied with the old dictum of media being unidirectional: those in the biz ramming the day’s events down your throat with you having little, if any, chance to interact. Audiences are now getting directly involved in the flow of a newsday. Producing news without giving the audience an opportunity to interact with it or with those who produced it is now seen as a severely inferior way of publishing since the paradigm shift brought about by the weblog.

Could one predict the same for TV after vlogs begin to take hold? Possibly, but for a different reason, I think. Read more

In this short article at bizcommunity.com, Stanely Edwards from Platypus Production talks about the rise of vlogalism (vlog journalism).

According to Stanley Edwards, partner in Platypus Productions, video content production specialists, convergent technologies are one of the few ways to reach the elusive yet powerful 16 - 24 year olds.

For Edwards, keeping a finger on the pulse of technology is the key to Platypus Productions’ competitive advantage. “It’s good to know we’re considered great guys to work with but I believe it is our use of new media that gives us the edge. We are currently reviewing software that simplifies production processes with a great cost saving to our clients. The prevalence of Vlogs or video blogs are considered such a risk to television journalism that media industry chat rooms are jammed with discussions about them. At the end of the day it’s all about content and not technology and that’s where we win,” he says.

A few points here:

All this may be true, but if its the 16-24 year olds they’re aiming at, the truth is, for MOST 16-24 year olds, the news doesn’t matter much. Not all, of course, but most. There are grassroots organizations that appeal to this segment, but the lasting effect of this segment of the population on the culture as a whole, these days and in politically democratic societies, is questionable. This segment of the population does indeed change the cultural infrastructure, but only certain elements of the cultural infrastructure. The media often likes to pretend otherwise because that’s a story that always seems fresh and exciting. The truth is, as the old saying goes, the world is still run by men (and women too now) in their 50s. Read more

For those who are still interested in video of the tsunami in Asia, you can find some here: Wavedestruction.org - Photos and Videos from the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

One of the odd things about watching some of these videos is the sunny skies. I think we usually associate natural disaster with physical darkness and gloom - floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, blizzards, even volcanic eruptions leave the sky dark with ash. But these videos show the clear tropical skies of otherwise beautiful South and South East Asia.

What is a vlog? That’s a good question for a first post, I would think. But I have a feeling that the answer isn’t so simple, and that as long as I write this blog, it’ll be a question I come back to again and again. In fact, I’ve created a whole category for that question so I can dump any ramblings I might have there.

Of course on the most basic level, the question “What is a vlog?” can be answered quite easily. “V” stands for video, and “log” stands for, well, log. So a vlog is a video log - a video record, or journal, or progress report. And, of course, the term vlog has its origins in the term blog.

But when you get into the different possible definitions of what a journal or a progress report or a record can contain, you begin to get into murky waters. Vlogs, I believe, will be a very different animal than simply blogs (web logs) with video. Although a blog can be technically any type of media posted to a web log (including, of course, video), it’s my guess that blogs and vlogs will one day part ways and be considered two very different types of outlets. Some people will put video onto their mostly text blogs, and some people will put text on their vlog sites, and some will marry the two almost equally, but it’s my guess that when the general public begins to discover vlogs, and more and more people begin putting their latent visual sophistication to work in the form of video logs, the world will begin to look at vlogs and blogs as very different entities.

Without the debate even having started (that I know of), I’m sure one day soon this question of “What is a vlog?” will inflame many a good people (mostly snobs vs. non-snobs … snobs can be good people too … in their own way). Trying to answer the question “What is a vlog?” will be like trying to answer the question “What is art?” There will be those who insist that to be a vlog, it has to follow a set of pre-defined criteria. Some will argue that in order to define something there has to be, well, definition, i.e. specific qualities ascribed to the thing being defined. And, of course, that’s so. But the problem they will run in to, in my opinion, is that the specific qualities they will use to define what a vlog is will be “pre-defined.” An important aspect of definitions is that they are actually “after the fact” labeling devices. Definitions are contextually dependent. They not only label, they evolve as the animal being labeled evolves. If they don’t, they become useless.

I’m afraid I can see it coming already. There will be vlog snobs who will insist that video a, b, or c isn’t a “vlog” because it doesn’t do x, y, or z. “It might be a video,” they’ll say, “and it might be posted on something that looks like a blog, but it isn’t a vlog. I know, because I vlog and my vlogs do x,y, and z .” And, of course, they’ll be wrong.

But just as wrong-headed will be those who consider themselves non-vlog snobs and who maintain that anything they put into a video form and post to the internet is a vlog. The problem there is that if you begin to stretch definitions so much that they’ll cover almost anything, well, they lose their definition. But it’s my guess that the non vlog snobs will be more right than the vlog snobs. If a vlog is a video “log,” then we have to look a little deeper into the question of what a “log” actually is.

According to the American Heritage dictionary, the definitions of “log” that most apply in this case (allowing for interpretation) are the following:

2. b. A record of a ship’s speed, its progress, and any shipboard events of navigational importance. c. The book in which this record is kept. 3. A record of a vehicle’s performance, as the flight record of an aircraft. 4. A record, as of the performance of a machine or the progress of an undertaking: a computer log; a trip log.

How are you going to define how someone might most effectively express the “progress” or the “events” of their internal lives, for example? I can predict many vlog snobs from the beginning insisting that a vlog will have to take on an air of nonfiction. But doesn’t a fictional story or an imaginative poem often reflect the truth better than the facts? It’s an ironic twist, of course, that it’s the artists, in this case vlogartists, who will be on the receiving end of the snobs’ disdain.

There will be many vloggers who point their cameras at their faces and either read an opinion they’ve written out, or ramble on about things they’ve been thinking about (or not, as the case may be). This is most definitely a vlog, but only one kind. I can foresee many of these straight-shooting vloggers scoffing at interpretive, though no less revealing, vlogs.

I’m sure we will also see a rise in the phenomenon of what I’ll call vlogalism practiced by vlogalists — that is, vlog journalism practiced by vlog journalists. And make no mistake, these vlogalists will change our world. Some will happen upon an event quite by accident, as in the case of the vlogalists in the middle of the recent tsunami in Asia. But there will be others who actively and aggressively pursue vlogalism, either as a means to advance their careers as mainstream journalists, or simply as a demanding “hobby,” if you will; however many who do it as something other than a career climbing maneuver may have untold hidden objectives and agendas.

The rise of vlogalists and vlogalism will be interesting to watch, but there are easily-spotted problems on the horizon – not the least of which is credibility. That “professional” news organizations are, in fact, corporate money-making machines can actually be beneficial in some respects. They are dependent on advertising, and their reputations are dependent on their credibility. People like to squawk about how News Organization A is simply a mouthpiece for Political View X, but everyone knows that when reporting the “news” they can’t outright lie time after time. Even their own choir would eventually turn on them. Their credibility is what makes them attractive to corporate money. Independent vlogalists with an axe to grind and no aspirations for a professional journalism career, however, are beholden to no one. To be sure, their vlogs, being video, will have an air of authenticity, more so than any written blog could ever hope for. And this is one of the important differences between writing a text blog and producing a video.

For the most part, with a few notable exceptions, text blogs have taken on the role of commentaries, not news stories. Vlogs will also occupy this space, but the unique power that video offers will make them more attractive to the independent journalists. With text, you can simply sit at home with a computer and make things up, but staging or manipulating video is a little more involved. That fact alone gives video its added credibility. Of course manipulating video is possible already, and it will only get easier as more people become more sophisticated with video, but for a while anyway, some disingenuous vlogalists will wreak havoc in more than one person’s life as most people still want to believe what their eyes see, or at the very least, what their brains are telling their eyes to see. What exactly will happen, who it will happen to, when it will happen, where it will happen, why it will happen, and how it will happen are all questions we’ll probably have the answers to sooner than we think.

But more on all that later. Fortunately, I believe, there’s more benefit to come from vlogs than harm. It’s an exciting time. Although vlogs have actually been around for a few years now, they’re on the cusp of an explosion. We haven’t even begun to see what vlogs will do or what they can be.