YouTube and Blogging

I am sad to see that the YouTube video posted on this blog is no longer available. But I thought that would be a good segue into YouTube and blogging in general.

Traditionally (is that even possible in such a short time?) like most things on the early web, blogs consisted of text - an online written diary. Today, with fast internet connections, cheap webcams, YouTube, and free video software, the blog has morphed. Video blogs, or vlogs (everything on the Internet seems to get abbreviated?) are now everywhere. YouTube even blogs about itself in a video blog (see www.youtube.com/blog).

Most people know the story of lonelygirl15 (I won't recap it here - look it up on wikipedia!). After video blogging on YouTube for a while, lonleygirl15 was outed as a produced, fictitious character. Did this matter to her fans? Many blogs today are based on fictitious identities. But many people were upset (see http://tinyurl.com/2x5r5w). Does the fact that the blog is in video form make us more upset that we were cheated than a written blog would? Do we feel more connected to a video than to plain text on the screen?

In our class, we have been discussing whether the nature of the Internet has changed how we perceive our relationships with respect to our former purely "real world" relationships. I think the reaction to lonleygir15's bogus identity shows that even within the Internet, relationships have different meanings based on the medium.

But I am wandering away from the topic of blogging.... Bloggers create online identities for themselves, and the medium that they use to convey that personality has a significant impact on how they are perceived in the "real world." Video blogging has just added to the Internet a new layer of personality.