"Show" or Tell: Where's the Themed Content?

At the Converge South conference a couple of weeks ago, Amanda Congdon from Rocketbook delivered a presentation entitled "Themed Content for Videoblogs." Introducing her topic, she said "I'm dying for shows!" What does she mean? I think she's talking about what a number of vlog-watchers are talking about. I hear this cropping up in online discussions and video conferences. And I confess, sometimes I'm the one bringing it up. My echo of Congdon's question, "Where are the shows?" usually comes after I try to explain to my friends why videoblogs are so great. The conversations often go like this: Me: Wow I watched more than 15 videoblogs last night. Friend: Really? What were they about? Me: Uuhhh... Or sometimes, if I'm feeling ambitious, like this: Friend: So what are all those video thingers you watch about? Me: Well, see, in this one, this person sort of just talks about her life, like what she thinks about how many choices of shampoo are at the store, and she'll take her camera to the store and shoot herself talking about it. Friend: You mean it's a show about shampoo? Me: No, she talks about whatever's on her mind, it's different all the time. Friend: You're kidding, right? Some videobloggers don't want to discuss this subject. They hear a call for "shows" as a call for old, dead media. They see vlogs as a wholly unique and personal expression of free speech that should not be shackled with the conventional expectations of old media. "Hey man, I'm the media now, back off! You don't like it, then don't watch!" The question at hand is, why are so many (the majority by my estimation) videoblogs not about any single thing or set of things? Or as wikipedia characterizes them, "personal?" They don't seem to have a theme or focus. They can't quite be described as being "about" something. (This includes my own vlog). In other words, they're not shows. I concede that the folks who don't want them to be shows (for lack of a more imaginative term I'll call these good people "vlogging purists" in this post) make a compelling argument. It goes something like the following... Videoblogging at its core is about The New Way. A new way of making media. A new way of distributing media. New paradigms, new approaches, new rules -- scratch that: no rules! We needn't limit our new selves with old expectations, which were created by our old nemesis, TV. The categorization of "shows" by genre, subject, and content is mostly the result of generations of marketing and advertising trend-setting. Slicing communities into demographics, pigeonholing individuals as consumers, and creating expectations based on the dominating agenda: to sell us all something. The purist argument insists that we don't want to be sold to anymore, and I happen to agree (mostly). So now this raises a fascinating question that the purists deserve an answer to: if there were no money at stake, what would media look like? For the sake of fairness and simple intellectual curiosity, the vlogging purists deserve the space to find out what happens to media when the corporate interests (such as "audience size and attention span") no longer dominate. If you don't have to maintain a Nielsen rating, if you won't lose your job when viewers get bored during sweeps, if you don't need to wrap it all up in 22 minutes between commercials and before the Seinfeld reruns come on -- if you don't have to worry about any of that, then why not shampoo? Discovering this radical concept of newness is an organic process, and will take time. Old habits need to be examined, debunked, and discarded. New ways of framing content need the freedom to emerge over time. Not to put too fine a point on it: NO SHOWS! This is an idea that does have appeal, and it has the potential of producing new genres and ways of seeing the world. In the meantime, I enjoy watching people work this out. It's not always Shakespeare, but it's something new and interesting and it should be allowed room to breathe. But then what is there for Amanda Congdon, who still wants shows, but not the old kind of shows, she wants shows made by new creators for new audiences from a new point of view. She does, after all, participate in making one of her own. Where are the vlogged sitcoms? Where is the vlogged murder mystery? It doesn't have to slavishly immitate Hollywood. In fact it would be better if it didn't, I'm ready for something subversive like The Blair Witch Vlog. The podcasters seemed to figure this out fairly early on. Podcasting's infancy spawned "soundseeing tours" of the walk to the train station ("Now I'm walking past a fire hydrant.") I like these personal podcasts and I'm glad they're still around. But it didn't seem long before the majority of the podcasters declared, "I'm passionate about something, I'm totally into macrame, I'm going to make a great Macracast!" Is it somehow harder to do this with video? Is there something unique about spoken language, as opposed to moving images, that tends toward themed content? I'm aware that there are some videoblogs that are more thematic. Rocketboom is an exercise in programmed content, even though they will often break the programming if the fancy strikes them. We can count on Minnesota Stories meeting a certain loosely held set of expectations. The Steve and Carol Show, while undeniably "personal," is still indeed mostly about Steve and Carol. Vlogs are not universally random rambles. I'm simply wondering how and where more structure and production programming will appear. And most importantly for the vlogging community, is there room for both approaches? Will the people who eventually create weekly installments of "Desperate Vlogwives" do so without trashing the Shampoocast? And will the vlogging purists understand that experiments in structured programming represent an expansion of territory, not a betrayal of principle? Most conversations I have about this with other vloggers end with the un-profound yet nevertheless probably true: "Time will tell."