Vernacular Video

Bruce Sterling’s blog has an awesome essay by Tom Sherman called Vernacular Video.

If you’re mildly interested in what the future of video ubiquity might bring, then it’s worth a read.

What Are the Current Characteristics of Vernacular Video?

Displayed recordings will continue to be shorter and shorter in duration, as television time, compressed by the demands of advertising, has socially engineered shorter and shorter attention spans. Video-phone transmissions, initially limited by bandwidth, will radically shorten video clips.

The use of canned music will prevail. Look at advertising. Short, efficient messages, post-conceptual campaigns, are sold on the back of hit music.

Recombinant work will be more and more common. Sampling and the repeat structures of pop music will be emulated in the repetitive deconstruction of popular culture. Collage, montage and the quick-and-dirty efficiency of recombinant forms are driven by the romantic, Robin Hood-like efforts of the copyleft movement.

Real-time, on-the-fly voiceovers will replace scripted narratives . Personal, on-site journalism and video diaries will proliferate.

On-screen text will be visually dynamic, but semantically crude. Language will be altered quickly through misuse and slippage. People will say things like I work in several mediums [sic]. Media is plural. Medium is singular. What’s next: I am a multi-mediums artist? Will someone introduce spell-check to video text generators?

Crude animation will be mixed with crude behaviour. Slick animation takes time and money. Crude is cool, as opposed to slick.

Slow motion and accelerated image streams will be overused, ironically breaking the real-time-and-space edge of straight, unaltered video.

Digital effects will be used to glue disconnected scenes together; paint programs and negative filters will be used to denote psychological terrain. Notions of the sub- or unconscious will be objectified and obscured as quick and dirty surrealism dominates the creative use of video.

Travelogues will prosper, as road films and video tourism proliferate. Have palm-corder and laptop, will travel.

Extreme sports, sex, self-mutilation and drug overdoses will mix with disaster culture; terrorist attacks, plane crashes, hurricanes and tornadoes will be translated into mediated horror through vernacular video.

It’s great stuff, but it makes me wonder if we really know what will happen with video in the next 10 years. After all, television may have bred short attention spans, but when the cost of producing and distributing video drops, perhaps we’ll see attention spans increase because of media lasting several hours.

Check out the essay at Sterling’s blog for more of the above.

Video Search and Recommendations

The Oregonian has an article about video search, For Web video, search is the key.

“The key point to understand is that Internet video is going to go to the television,” said Phil Leigh, founder and principal analyst of Inside Digital Media, a digital media market research firm. “All of us are going to use the (Internet) search tool to find what we want to watch” on TV.

Search is incredibly important to content these days. There is so much that we rely on it to find everything–I do anyway. However, it’s not the only way to find great content. In fact recommendations make a much more compelling way to find content, especially audio and video. Whether a friend mentions a great new show, or a group you below to suggests some great listening, recommendations are usually more reliable that stumbling around search results: especially with so much content online.

That’s why we’ve built a few ways to be given recommendations for online audio and video. Imagine turning on your television and having a bunch of relevant shows queued up waiting for you to watch, ones that you didn’t know about, but when you watch them you realise they match your tastes or interests. That’s what Scouta is aiming for.

Peter Gabriel’s Human Right YouTube

Peter Gabriel’s Witness group is one of the reasons that I am passionate about online video and audio. It’s now not only up to major news organizations to spread the word, but is at a point where it rests with all of us to make a difference by being involved (I’m partially stealing from Cameron Reilly’s thought that he often expresses on G’day World). Ten years ago we couldn’t spread a message as far and wide as we now can, and with audio and video the message we send can be so much more compelling.

From the article Peter Gabriel enlists videos for human rights:

Gabriel has been trying to get the businesses gathered at Davos to come up with cash or technology for Witness, a group he founded and which seeks to use video from cameras or phones to bring human rights abuse to light.

“With the telephone and Internet, anyone, anyplace can tell their story,” he told Reuters in an interview.

One of Witness’ main goals at the moment is to build a video hub where evidence of human rights abuse can be uploaded.

“You have seen the trend to citizen journalism,” Gabriel said, referring to the ability of people to record and distribute news and events rapidly with phones and cameras.