Trine

A schematic overview of the videoblog platform, 2005.

Within academic publishing diagrams and other visualisations are often treated in a purely functional manner. As a result, little regard is given to the visual qualities of these designs. But I think “matters of fact should understood as matters of concern” (my apologies to Bruno Latour).

In Videoblogging Before YouTube, Trine Bjørkmann Berry offers a cultural history of online video, focusing on the critical moment when the internet moved from being a mostly textual medium to a truly multimedia one. Through a close analysis of the early videoblogging community and their creative practices, she argues that early in the new millennium a new cultural-technical media hybrid emerged. This coalesced around the short-form digital film whose aesthetic, technical form and content is a predecessor to, and anticipator of our current media ecology.

Trine Bjørkmann Berry is a visiting researcher at the University of Sussex. She publishes on online video, digital culture and aesthetics. Her new research examines the history and practices of the video essay.

ISBN: 978-94-92302-22-9