I’m very proud to have kept my blog going for over twenty years. I think I’ve said here before that I see it as my primary output as a writer, recording my thoughts, observations and experiences from day to day. I started blogging when blogging was more or less in its infancy, and still primarily a practice confined to writing. Internet users had to visit your blog to read what you had written.

These days, however, the online landscape is very different. Vlogging on websites like YouTube seems to have exploded, and is probably now bigger than straightforward blogging ever was. I hardly spend any time on YouTube without encountering a vlogger; that is, a person expressing their thoughts and reflections directly into a camera, or filming something that they want to express to viewers.

This evolution of blogging interests me. It is, at the same time, an extension of blogging in that internet users are expressing their thoughts to other internet users; and also fundamentally different from it.

Blogging can be seen as a form of writing; and writing is an art, as it always has been. It takes a certain amount of skill to construct sentences and write them down to form a coherent statement. Obviously some entries take more effort and skill than others, but on the whole I try to put at least a little thought into what I write here. Vlogging, on the other hand, seems to now be more a matter of pointing a camera and pressing record. 

There will naturally be advantages and disadvantages to this, and it isn’t my intention to sound too negative. While I have continued to express myself through writing as I cannot physically use cameras or speak clearly enough, vlogging has obviously made expressing yourself on the web much more accessible. For most people using a webcam or camera phone is much easier, quicker and simpler than sitting down and writing something. You could even say it was a step towards the democratisation of blogging and online expression, as such a simplification allows a more diverse range of views to be expressed.

However, I’m starting to fear that that very opening up has meant far more reactionary, less thought through opinions are now being broadcast. Vlogging is simply a matter of speaking into a camera and uploading the results to huge websites like YouTube, meaning that anyone can record anything they like and it will be available to the same audience as any other online video. I am thus now coming across far more reactionary, less educated or nuanced views online. Whereas a blog entry, like any piece of writing, can be drafted and redrafted, resulting in a more refined end product, the videos I now come across are far rougher and unedited: someone has simply spewed a stream of right wing bile into a camera and put it online for all to see without a second’s worth of real consideration. Such spewings are becoming more and more reactionary, deranged and intolerant, as vloggers vie to attract attention. And because of YouTube’s search algorithms, the chances are it will reach a far bigger audience than anything I write here!

A lot of what is uploaded to YouTube these days is absolutely outstanding, and I’m seeing more and more pieces of very refined, technical filmic art. There are thousands of highly skilled, intelligent filmmakers on YouTube. They all naturally have a right to express their own points of view, whatever they may be. Yet alongside them are an increasing number of talentless hacks with absolutely no technical skill, uploading whatever reactionary right wing bile they like and demanding it receives the same attention as anything else. Websites like YouTube have certainly opened up and diversified public discourse; but in so doing it has encouraged a lot of bigoted, uneducated voices to be raised out of the rotting rhetorical cesspit that they would have been confined to before now.