And this one is about finding the perfect pumpkin.
posted by Drew Keller @ Thursday, May 18, 2006
0 comments
If a video is posted on the web and no one sees it, is it really there? OK, this is a half-hearted spin on the tree in the forest query. But the rhetorical question is still relevant. Who is watching what is on the web?
I do not deny Jonathan Price’s notion that an author must always keep the audience in mind. I have created too many flabby, unfocused, crappy documentaries on television that failed to keep this axiom in mind. Much of my personal work on the web falls in the extreme of narrow-casting. I often create media for an audience of ten or twenty specific viewers. I know who they are and why they are watching. If someone comes along randomly and grazes from one of my offerings that is fine. But they are not my target.
What I find interesting in this discussion about rhetoric is the difference in experience and purpose between the written word and moving media (by this I mean flash movies ala JibJab, podcasts, video blogs, streaming media and webcasts.) The fluidity and nimbleness of electronic text affords a genuine dialogue between the writer and the reader. A dialogue that moves like a tennis match on speed, with thousands of players whacking at the ball, only to duck an incoming volley and smack back another. A chaos of conversation where there is no end to the game, just players who watch the entropy, or join in and leave when they are tired. It is often game of words that may or may not advance towards a goal.
Moving media on the other hand is still an intrinsically observational form of communication. The voices used by the story tellers are certainly different than previous media (film, television, and cartoons.) But the complexities and tediousness of creating moving media is just as ponderous as ever. Instead of managing one voice (the written word) a media producer may manage four or five voices (narrative, pictures, graphics, music, and natural sound.) All advancing in concert towards a narrative’s conclusion. The dialogue between a creator and a viewer is that of call and response. A creator will post media on the web, and perhaps someone will comment on the story. But they will not abridge the original media, nor are they likely to capture it and repurpose it for another post. Those comments may spark a written conversation, even an entirely new video post in response. But it is not a dialogue using moving media.
I like to think of successful video on the web as poetry. Not because of its elegance, because much of it is anything but elegant. No, I think that many of the most successful media elements on the web are personal stories, shared in the first person, reaching an audience not with the traditional model of one-to-many, but as a more personal experience of one-to-one. An exploration of personal observations, insights, experiences and aspirations. Not unlike the difference between poetry and prose. For me, television and films are like prose, successful web videos are like poetry.
Perhaps this paradigm will change as bandwidth changes. As images begin to occupy a larger footprint on our screens, as frame rates improve and we lessen the choppy playback, as the web appears on our television instead of on our laptops then perhaps the scale of the voice used on the web will move back to the prose of television. But until then, the most successful moving media on the web is the poetry of the personal story.
posted by Drew Keller @ Thursday, May 18, 2006
0 comments
The scintillating blog for the excitement of COM585. It doesn't get any better than this. Well, OK, perhaps it does.
