Videoblogs and the creation of shared understanding.
Why are videoblogs promising? So I had this idea:
Consider what happens when you are watching TV (say, the news), and you discuss this with your partner who is watching the same program.
As you discuss what you see, you are building Shared Understanding. Because we are social animals, building shared understandings is crucial to our functioning and understanding of the world. We don't just think about the world and then come up with an interpretation (although that happens as well), most of the time we discuss the world and build a shared understanding within our social circle. After all, most people don't really want to have opinions that their social circle strongly disagrees with.
TV has made building shared understanding less of an activity between equals. More of the understanding is built by the journalist/presentor/actors... When we watch people discuss something, we are also building shared understanding, but we are not participating. In this, we loose something.
Now that some of our communities are moving to the internet, building shared understanding is blossoming through the conversations held on weblogs.
However, there are few discussions about the news we see on TV. We can discuss facts (easy to list), or newspaper articles (easy to link to), but discussing what Bush said at a certain point in a video, or what happened in a video of Iraq is harder. It's hard to describe. It's very hard to link to. So it becomes hard to discuss, and little shared understanding is built by us. The big media are still in control.
When we can easily videoblog, and quote video, we may be able to create conversations about the TV we watch and thus take back some of the autonomy lost. This, for me, is a large part of the promise of videoblogging.