Alastair Cooke

V is for Vlogging – is it the Future or the Devil?

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Spoiler Alert!

If you are a Blogger who thinks that Vloggers are the spawn of the Devil then I must warn you that this post contains a Vlog post – by yours truly – but fear not, I am not going to become a regular Vlogger, this guest appearance is only in the interests of exploring the difference between the two phenomena – Blogging and Vlogging…

Appearances

Have you ever wondered how your favourite Bloggers look? In some cases, (including myself) they do provide a thumbnail or even a proper picture of themselves such as the writers Sharon Cathcart or Sarah Zama. I have a confession to make – my thumbnail is at least a decade old but I feel it strikes the right note – so it stays – if you want to see me now you will have to watch the Vlog… But there are others – and I am not criticising – such as my most faithful visitor, commenter and my mentor for promoting this blog – Frédérique at Applique Patchwork Quilting who remain a mystery. Frédérique has become a voice without appearance in my head and it is strange that we should apply that term to written words and that is one of the things that I want to explore by comparing blogs and vlogs.

Crossover

My first post in this A to Z 2020 Challenge was about Alistair Cooke and I suggested, that because he first wrote down and then read out  his iconic “Letter from America”, Cooke should be considered the prototypical Blogger and in recording his blog he made crossover to broadcasting – first Radio and later TV with his series “America”. Vlogging is the screen crossover child of blogging for the generation who hardly watch TV but get a lot of their screen leads from YouTube.

What is a Vlog?

Just like its progenitor, the Blog, the Vlog is, at its simplest, a dated video post. Like blogs, vlogs have many uses, diary, business tool, marketing, educational, documentary, political message but they differ from blogs because they each have different strengths and weaknesses.
Vlogs are visual and their authors (if blogs can have a voice, then videos can be authored) have to be seen – so not for the shy and self-conscious. in fact vlogs have been analyzed for “personality traits such as Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience.” (Wikipedia) Since we humans learn in so many ways, then for some, video is a far more effective way to learn (or just be entertained) whereas others learn (or enjoy) the written word better. Surely the vlog conveys much more than the words that are spoken – the non-verbal cues are equally important and anyone who hs watched a nerd with a personality void give a video post about something technical will know what I mean. Text is notorious for being unreliable at conveying tone – short texts between people in particular but at least with a blog, we have longer pieces in which to develop our message and over the course of following a particular blogger, we get to recognize more accurately their “voice” and their stance through the choice of words, content and style.
This post has already included several links to other parts of the internet and this is more difficult to do on a vlog or indeed TV broadcasting – how many times following a TV programme – even drama, have we heard over the credits – “If any viewers have been affected by the issues raised in the programme – please go to our website for links to support you…” On the other hand a blog is limited to still photos or embedded videos to show the reader things with a flow – but then again – you can always go back to that link in a blog.

The Best of Both Worlds…

Perhaps the most effective way of managing content, if neither blogging nor blogging conveys everything you need to say, is a combination – a blog with a vlog embedded – that way you can put all the links, the carefully polished words into the blog whilst including the more emotional, personal, non-verbal communication into the vlog element.
To test this, I am going to take a leap into the dark, or considering that I will reveal myself, warts and all, a leap into the light by posting a vlog right here…

And Frédérique, there is something especially for you…


So there it is – Hit or a Miss? You decide…


You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter



A is for Alistair Cooke

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Part of childhood Sunday mornings back in the 1960s, was my father switching on the radio on the upstairs landing of our house whereby everybody in the house could listen whilst having a lie-in. After “Hymns from the little chapel in the valley” – a precursor of Songs of Praise and before the omnibus edition of “The Archers” there was “Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America”. I am starting the A to Z 2020 challenge with this seminal broadcasting giant because for me, this is where my love of the blog form begins.


There may be some among you who ask how a long-running radio series which began before blogs were conceived of, before PC’s were dreamt of and in fact before mainframe computers were invented, could be considered a Blog! Well in the beginning, Blogs were conceived as a simple sequence of dated posts – ideal for say, a diary. One of the hallmarks of a truly great piece of new technology is perhaps the degree and breadth of mission-creep which accrues to it as people explore it and blogs have moved from a diary to documentary, educational tool, club forum, therapeutic vent, political rant, and blogs cover every subject imaginable. But for me, the classic form is a missive from the individual to the world which reveals their thoughts, reflections and most enjoyably, their personality and it is in this respect that Alistair Cooke is the model for the form. In 2,869 episodes over 58 years, the longest running, spoken word broadcast ever, he spoke with a mellifluous, mid-Atlantic accent that gave his observations on America, explaining it if you will, not only to Britain but to the world via the BBC World Service, but as well, to Americans themselves. They were already used to Alistair’s voice because before he emigrated to America from Britain in 1937, he had delivered “London Letter” for NBS explaining British ways to America.

You can read the quite astonishing history of this prolific broadcaster and writer here and you can listen to the best of the broadcasts here but it’s the style and tone of Alistair Cooke which I love and aspire to channel in my own writing and although he read his broadcast aloud, – his material was, in the first instance, written. You can find the scripts here. He might begin with some observations about squirrels preparing for winter and then take you around the political action in Washington, the reaction of the people before returning effortlessly to the Fall, and the squirrels. The political content would be teased out and explained for the world in a way that was comfortable, reassuring without any hint of patronage. And when you needed to hear about the gravest moments in American history, such as the assassination of JF Kennedy, there was no safer pair of hands, no more moving commentator to describe the events and the reaction of Americans.

That radio on our landing, itself an object of Americana which my father adapted to UK voltage by mounting a light-bulb on top, took us to another country each week – to Alistair Cooke’s America as we lay in bed and listened.

2,869 letters – blog that!

Published as part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

A Writer is someone who writes…

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A blogger on my reading list has thrown down a challenge that chimes with a decision I had already arrived at, namely that I must write more and set myself some specific challenges. Over on “Off go the Panties”, Panty Parade has posted the “The Stop Whining Twelve Step, Twelve Week Challenge” to all recalcitrant writers claiming to be blocked, too busy yada, yada, yada. 

I’m in!

I started or rather re-started writing creatively a few years back when I lived in Co. Sligo, Ireland – a place steeped in the likes of WB Yeats and soused with a barful of contemporary writers. The vicissitudes of schooling had meant giving up anything but criticising other people’s writing at an early age and I had forgotten the pleasure of setting sail down an open page…

I progressed from short pieces generated in a writing group to a novel that now stands at some 40 thousand words and which I have added to in the last few years in a desultory fashion – but now the time has come to knuckle down and finish it. So below I will list some goals and seek a mentor as per the challenge but first let me share an insight.

On Sunday mornings my parents, and by custom, us children too, had a lie in. My father would switch on a small radio on the landing and we would all hear “Songs form the Little Chapel in the Valley”, “The Archers” Omnibus edition and Alastair Cooke’s “Letter from America” and it came to me suddenly the other day that my blogging style owes much to Mr Cooke’s wonderful rambles that would start and return to some key observation on American life by way of several other fascinating stories. Blogs are like a diary and all diaries are addressed to some future audience whatever anyone says and Alastair Cooke was definitely and directly addressing the British audience with his observations softly dropped into our Sunday morning ears. So perhaps he was the prototypical blogger from before the internet was born. I wonder how many others had their writing sensibilities subtle shaped by the wonderful Mr Cooke.

Back to the challenge…

Goals:-

1. What kind of writer am I (and what programme of writing will suit me)?
I am a morning person by choice and I can get out of bed and write before I have even had a cup of tea and if I can do this regularly it suits me and I will steadily increase the words in my novel. I have thought enough about the novel I have plenty that just needs to get out. 

2. I also like blogging and besides this one which takes me when I feel inspired, I also started a new one dealing with my relationship to photography. This is partly an excuse to get my brain in gear in another way so although it might seem counter-productive to finishing the novel. I also commit to posting at least once a week both here and there.

3. I am going to seek a mentor for the novel writing and by way of a fishing trip, I include a fragment below and to anyone who cares to read more I will send 2 chapters of what is a sub-plot of the book. As a result of any comments I receive back, I may request a mentor.

There are other goals to the challenge but I will return to them in later posts.
Any other stalled writers out there? Take the challenge…

The novel – a fragment…

As the Dublin coach made it ‘s way along the banks of the Liffey, through the evening rush hour traffic, a pedestrian with more than a little “drink taken”, lurched off the pavement. The jolt of brakes applied suddenly together with the driver’s curses brought Margaret out of the trance she had been in for the whole journey. The same song had been going round and round in her head without registering but now she realised with a certain amount of chagrin, it was The Beatles “She’s Leaving Home”. Before the words could unfold their story again, at this moment too painfully close to her own home, Margaret switched her attention to the river running alongside The Quays. In the Margaret of all previous journeys heading into Dublin along the Liffey had always produced a barely suppressed excitement. A teacher had once told her class how every breath you take contains a molecule of air expelled by Julius Caesar in his dying breath. Peering down into the green walled channel, the water always at a different height depending on the state of the tide, Margaret had thenceforth imagined the Liffey as a lung for Dublin – breathing it’s slow, twice daily intake of water that might have come from anywhere in the world. What foreign ports had breathed in this water before and where would it waft to next? Further down The Quays, you could see the ships moored that went to other countries and as a child she had pictured herself on board some vessel, swimming out the river, through the sea and up some other river in “foreign parts. Tonight, the dream would become reality, she would change at Bus Aras an head out to the North Wall and board the night ferry to Holyhead, not the most exotic destination possible but a gateway to a new life nevertheless. She would take the train to London and do a little sight seeing but she wouldn’t stay there in case she was followed – no, she would move on somewhere else, somewhere less obvious, somewhere special. Exactly where she wasn’t sure, but it would come to her, or rather shewould come to it.