Hey YouTube, what's up!? It's ya boi Foldable Human here just wanted to take
a moment to talk about vlogging and a bunch of other stuff
I don't know that, it was, it was like a little, a little spiritual experience in the sense it was a
good meditative moment to kind of sit back and think about the channel and
stuff and this is something that's been on my mind for a while now but I've
been wanting for a while to just kind of pivot the channel, like, lightly pivot the
channel to just to be just a little less cynical and that's not to say be more
frivolous; you can be engaged and excited and still be you know in depth and
intricate and invested so that's that's kind of the plan and the hope and going
to get out of this car's way. As always I feel it's important to cover some basic
ground make sure that we have a shared vocabulary for the subject at hand so
let's start with the obvious perhaps even banal question what is a vlog and
then we'll use that as a springboard into the follow-up question no really
what is a vlog? To start we need to rewind the clock a bit to the internet
before YouTube. Back when the internet was still mostly text with some photos
some savvy forward-thinking people and a whole lot of regular bored people began
websites focusing on a journal like forum of casual slice-of-life
storytelling, maybe about a specific subject of interest like fashion or
movies, but just as often about nothing in particular beyond the individual's
personal life and insights. By the early 2000s this storytelling format these so
called web logs had caught on and reached the
mainstream. With this mainstreaming the cumbersome web log was truncated into
the neologism blog. Flash-forwards to the advent of YouTube a fresh-faced video
platform aiming to give you a place to put your home videos in the same way
photo bucket and Flickr had given you a place to put your pics and the journal
like storytelling came right along with it
birthing the video blog or vlog. Okay so why didn't we just skip 90 percent of that
and go straight to blog his blog but video and the answer to that is in our
second question no really what is a vlog. The key thing inherited from the blog
format is the casual nature, that slice-of-life storytelling, and the
perceived authenticity that comes from that tone of delivery.
What separates vlogs in texture from other video genres is the
nature of the delivery even if it's all an illusion, something we'll get back to
later. This is actually a slide back from the blog structure. Blogs as a written
medium are inherently atemporal; even a stream consciousness writing style is
still going to enjoy a level of craft, a precision in word choice, that eludes
the temporarily synchronous delivery of speech. This format here that I am using
right now is scripted. I've written and rewritten paragraphs, moved things around,
and paused at this moment in the script to consider where I want to take this
next. As a result it takes on a different feel, a different texture, a different
pace flow and structure from the more chaotic and rambling vlog. Wording
whether precise or poor and ill-considered has still been considered.
I have had to perform these words at least once before during the writing
process and am now performing them again during the actual recording and indeed
many of these lines I have recorded multiple times in order to get a
performance that I in order to get a performance that works. But even this
might be little more than illusion. The lines between vlog and not vlogs are
blurred by the medium of YouTube itself or more specifically the cultural
dialect of YouTube as the fictive space, how youtube as a collective cultural
entity has decided videos should sound. Side note I say should but that doesn't
actually mean should. Rather this is an example of what it means when people
like me talk about the grammar of film. If you were to take the body of existing
content, look at what rises to the top, and then sit down and write out a set of
prescriptive rules based on the outcomes, essentially reverse engineering the
rules from the product, that would give you the grammar of the medium. One of the
core grammatical rules of YouTube is the absence of silence manifested in
both a style of speech and a style of editing. Vlogs by the nature of their
creation trend toward chaotic and loose. When we're speaking extemporaneous we
pause to collect our thoughts we um and on uh and we repeat ourselves.
And because the medium is the message it's important to
remember that for years up until 2010 YouTube had a hard limit of 10 minutes
per video with only a select few accounts permitted to go over that limit
The point being that there were, in the formative days of online video,
structural incentives to keep things short. As a result all pauses have been
eliminated from the dialect unless they specifically serve the story. Unless a
pause has a purpose to create some form of comedic or emphatical tension it
should be removed. We've already seen this in action because we've used this
exact convention in this very video. It's ya boi Foldable Human here, just wanted
to take a moment to talk about vlogging and a bunch of other stuff.
I particularly enjoy how crown prince of vloggerdom John Green described this
phenomenon in the 2014 blog In Pursuit of Quiet.
and quiet is an interesting
thing to talk about on YouTube because attention has become so fractured on the
internet that there is no longer room in YouTube videos for any silence I think I
go back and I watch our videos from 2007 with the jump cuts that are really
really slow and the space between the jump cuts is just absolutely unbearable
like in those three silent frames I think to myself I might not survive
until the end of this video. Note how John is not talking about long pauses
and dead air but a matter of frames. I also picked that video because it in my
opinion typifies all of the relevant factors of
the vlog dialect. It is performed in a real space, that's with a capital R as
opposed to a studio or set, he is speaking incredibly fast, the editing has
sucked out all dead air, and it uses the jump cut. Now we've talked about the jump
cut a bit before but I think it's worth pointing out that its explicit purpose
in this context is to remove all the vocal tics, all the mistakes, that make
authentic personal performance actually authentic and personal. The synthesis
here of subject and performance gives us a format that sells itself on a
perception of authenticity, the extemporaneous personality of the person
doing the vlogging, merged with an aesthetic delivery that is decidedly
inauthentic, The end results becoming a form of hyper reality. John walks through
the airport delivering a continuous monologue across an explicitly
discontinuous spatial and temporal canvas. It is a dialect that is so
obviously synthetic that it becomes authentic, so clearly a simulation that
it feels hyper real. This hyper real cadence has, for better or worse, become
intrinsic to the wider dialect. Started in vlogs it is now merely what YouTube
sounds like. Performers on YouTube speak incredibly fast and edit their speech to
make it even faster. Scripted content chooses words and structures that convey
the feeling of casual speech. The line between vlog and not vlog are further
blurred by the illusory nature of their creation with vloggers repeating a
statement several times, refining delivery and wording, until they
get a version that they are happy with, essentially scripting in performance and
then editing in, well, editing, meaning that even the authenticity is not that
authentic. Of course this is all in flux. In the course of a decade we've already
seen the dialect evolve and shift. There's more that we could go into and
many of the subjects here I'd like to come back to in the future. The jump cut
in particular is often singled out as a staid and worn-out aesthetic convention,
more fake than hyper-real, and there's a backlash against the vocabulary
tics. I mean I opened this video with an intentional parody of what we have
collectively decided YouTube videos sound like. So what do you think? What
parts of the vlog dialect are here to stay and what's just a passing fad? What
will you tube sound like in another decade? Let me know in the comments.
On an unrelated note PBS idea channel will be wrapping up in a couple months
August 2017 I've put some links in the doobly-doo so I wanted to ensconce in
video form my deep thanks to them for their work over the years and Mike I'm
just going to straight a pillage your dialect now that you're no longer using it