[iDC] Vernacular Video (expanded version)

[Tom Sherman]

[Note: the following is an expanded version of "Vernacular Video," originally published in shorter form in Les Fleurs du Mal, issue #2, Montreal, Quebec, September 2006; and now in print in the Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.]
 
 
Vernacular Video
 
Tom Sherman  <twsherma at syr.edu>
 
Video as a technology is a little over forty years old. It is an offshoot of television, developed in the 1930s and a technology that has been in our homes for sixty years. Television began as a centralised, one-to-many broadcast medium. Television's centrality was splintered as cable and satellite distribution systems and vertical, specialised programming sources fragmented television's audience. As video technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of complete decentralisation. Forty years later, video technology is everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralised digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power. Video gear is portable, increasingly impressive in its performance, and it still packs the wallop of instant replay. As Marshall McLuhan said, the instant replay was the greatest invention of the twentieth century.
    
Video in 2008 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists - it is the people's medium. The potential of video as a decentralised communications tool for the masses has been realised, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age. Surveillance and counter-surveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era - it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become every person's POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity.
 
There are currently camcorders in twenty per cent of households in North America. As digital still cameras and camera-phones are engineered to shoot better video, video will become completely ubiquitous. People have stories to tell, and images and sounds to capture in video. Television journalism is far too narrow in its perspective. We desperately need more POVs. Webcams and videophones, video-blogs (vlogs) and video-podcasting will fuel a twenty-first-century tidal wave of vernacular video.
 
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. Videophone 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.