Dee Blind Mice

Through Deirdre Straughan I became aware of a 2008 blog post by Derek Powazek called Meaning-Making Machines.

It’s about how when we interact with people using computers there are gaps in our knowledge of the situation caused by a lack of social cues that are present in face-to-face human interactions. We fill in these gaps with images of our own making. Powazek claims these images are a product of our own insecurities, and they may sometimes be, but I’m not sure he makes the case that they are necessarily so constructed.

Every fortnight I take part in a telephone conference. This week I went to the meeting in person for the first time. The gaps I had filled in were not particularly different from the reality – they were just unspecific. Of course, the phone at least gives you voice rather than just words on a screen, so I did already have some social cues. But it was fascinating to me how much more I cared about the meeting having met the people involved in person. And I will care about the conference calls more too from now on, because my non-specific imaginings were a lot less engaging than the reality of the individuals I met.

Obviously video can’t provide all the social cues that text-only communications lack. People act differently in front of a camera than in face-to-face communication, and there is still a sense of distance. But some kind of video interaction, even minimal, with people you interact with online would seem to me to fill in at least some of the gaps.

The New York Times has an article about A Site for the Videos You Don’t Want Everyone to See. The site is called VidMe, and the idea is that you can use it to share videos with the people you know and love rather than with the entire world, as is normally the case with video sharing sites.

Well actually it is normally the case that video shared online is shared with people you know and love, the entire world is vanishingly unlikely to be watching clips of your family picnic along with your Ma and Da. But they could, should they choose, and that might matter.

In the comments on the NYT article the objections to this service seem to mainly be
1 that it is not possible to make anything on the web truly private
2 that you already can limit who can view videos using existing video sharing sites

Objection 1 is a well-rehearsed argument about online privacy being a pointless endeavour. I disagree with it, but that’s not really what interests me here.

One of the sites mentioned in support of Objection 2 is SmugMug. Now you may very well be able to upload private video to SmugMug, but what it promises is that “You Look Better Here”.

Compare this to VidMe and its question “Tired of sharing everything with everyone?”.

SmugMug’s upfront offer is:

• Unlimited photos
• No ads or spam
• Gorgeous galleries
• Stunning HD video

VidMe’s is:

• Privately share videos with only those you want
• Always see who has access to each of your videos
• Easily remove anyone’s access to any video instantly
• Take control of your online sharing

As Clay Shirky would have it, these services are making different, in fact contradictory, promises – the first is promising to make your media look professional and slick (presumably in order to impress people) and the second is offering to hide your media from all but the people you choose to share it with (presumably to communicate with people you know).

You could post video online before YouTube promised to let you “Broadcast yourself”. The fact that is has long been possible to restrict viewing of your videos doesn’t mean that it isn’t important when someone thinks it’s worth launching a service based specifically around doing that.

This is a service offering (a clunky and inconvenient) way to use video not to broadcast yourself but to talk to your friends. Few enough of existing video sharing sites are about that. The idea of broadcasting yourself has become the main way of conceiving of online video, even personal video. This is different.