A few days ago, Adrian Miles wrote a good post titled Being on the television, and while I'm not sure whether he's referring to me specifically, or the general populous on the videoblogging email list when he says a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, it is one of the few
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arguments I've seen which holds against videoblogging being a genre.
His point is this:
Television is the complex assemblage of production, distribution and consumption. Now, if a video blog (specifically its video content) is broadcast through this apparatus, it is television. Theres no ifs or buts about that. Which is why content based definitions of what a videoblog is dont work since it is the fact of broadcast and reception that constitutes television, not what is chosen to be broadcast and received.
The problem however continues to be with the analogies that are still being made with other mediums or genres. I can't flaw Adrian's argument, it is completely sound, if you consider this a new media delivery mechanism, and that we should continue the historical practice of labelling them such.
My point though is that it still comes down to this (which is discussed in my recent post on definition):
Video on the Internet is just that, video on the Internet, and in a few years, every piece of content on the Internet will be interconnected with all the technologies which are commonly used to label videoblogs: feeds, enclosures, chronology. In the same way that Adrian defines television, soon every web site will be technically defined as a videoblog.
Thus we have two options, either every web site on the Internet is a videoblog, because it will soon conform to the technical definition of videoblog, or we just call it what it is, video on the Internet.
Perhaps I am as Adrian says, the one with little knowledge, however nobody has yet been able to reconcile for me, the above issue with a technical definition for videoblog. Although I'm assuming that what Adrian means by little knowledge, is that I'm not an academic, which could in fact actually be much of my problem.
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