Blog #12: Choose the vlog you will use for your essay

The vlog I am watching was create by somebody named Rachel. She is in standing in a hotel stairwell recording her first vlog. Mostly she is talking about what makes a vlog a vlog. She has a blog but she has never told anyone about it. She says she is experiencing with it. She wonders what the difference is between a vlog and a blog. To her, she thinks they are similar, but a vlog is interesting because the person being recorded is talking to himself or herself in front of a video recorder; whereas, the blogger talks to himself or herself through writing.

Most interesting from what Rachel points out, I guess, is that vlogging tends to get lots of random information. I am thinking that this might be connected to what Wesch calls the audience collapse. Wesch says that audience collapse tends to result in strange private vlogging in strange private places, like that bathroom or the closet. This is definitely true for Rachel. She is recording her first vlog in the stairwell of a hotel. She says she didn’t want to record the vlog in her hotel room because she didn’t want people to think she was talking to herself. She does admit that recording her vlog in the stairwell is pretty unusual. I kept wondering what she thought people imagined she was doing while she was in the stairwell, especially since stairwells tend to echo. That’s a pretty funny concept really.

I think it would be interesting to compare first blogs with first vlogs. Rachel says she is creating this vlog for an assignment in her Digital Ethnography class in Kansas State University. She is in Mike Wesch’s class and is part of the undergraduate team researching vlogs. Mike Wesch talks about this research in his “An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube” video we watched earlier. Rachel’s YouTube name is Rachcald. Her video was uploaded on You Tube on March 22, 2008. The title of her vlog is “First Vlog - What Makes a Vlog a Vlog?” Rachel’s vlog can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbkC5JC8vvA. As of today, she has had 79 views.