The Rise (and somewhat fall) of the Vlog

The term “vlog” has risen in popularity over the past 7 or 8 years. “Vlog” is a shortening of the term “video blog”. The main way to find vlogs in on YouTube. The first vloggers date back to as early as 2007-2008. They were just regular ordinary people with regular jobs who thought it would be fun to share videos of themselves on the internet. Today, some of these people are thought of as celebrities. Back in the early days of YouTube, there weren’t many people who were vlogging, so pretty much anyone who posted content regularly gained a following. Whether or not they continued to hold that following is another story. 

Some of the more popular vloggers who are still popular today include Charles Trippy, the Shaytards, BFvsGF, and iJustine. They’ve managed to keep a hold of their audience and grow it into the millions. It’s interesting to think about how they rose to fame. All they do is post a video about their lives every day and people seem to enjoy it. What it comes down to is that they’re just charismatic, funny, great people(or in the case of the Shaytards have amazingly cute kids, or in the case of Charles Trippy join a band, get engaged, married, develop brain cancer, and get divorced.) They are the major success stories of vlogging.

The reason that I say “and somewhat fall” in the title is because now there are so many people who are trying to vlog, that it is almost impossible to rise to the level of success of all of the people I mentioned above. Take me, for example. I started vlogging in 2011 and have over 200 videos posted, and I only have 51 subscribers (shameless plug: SUBSCRIBE TO ME). The only people who will continue to majorly benefit from vlogging are the people who have been doing it for the longest.

Email Subscriptions

As I write this post, the icon on my mail app on my dock (yes I use a Mac) has a badge with “700” on it*. For anyone who doesn’t know (is there really anyone who doesn’t know what this means?), that means that I have 700 unread emails. How crazy is that? I want to say that about 97% of those emails are automatically generated emails that are sent to me because I, at one time or another, bought something or used a service from each sender. The fact that I didn’t bother to read any of them says a lot about how I, and presumably most other people, look at these email blasts.

This has become such a problem that Google started to implement functionality that separates all of your emails into different categories: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. There is a tab for each category that you click on to see emails that Gmail thought belonged in that category. The main reason I started using it: so I didn’t have to see all of the annoying promotional emails that I get. I only ever pay attention to emails that show up in the “Primary” section unless I see the notification on my phone and think “oh, that email deserves my attention, let me find it in the mass of unwanted emails that I have”. 

The first thing you may be thinking is “why don’t you just unsubscribe from those emails if you don’t want to see them?” Well, frankly, I don’t have the time or the desire to do that. I’m just going to keep using this flawed system that I have in place because I’m used to it and it fits nicely into my workflow. It would be an inefficient use of precious time to go through and unsubscribe from all of them, so I’m not going to until I absolutely need to because it’s so messed up that I can barely make sense of it.

Sounds a lot like how the Government treats the economy, right? Keep using the flawed system that everyone’s used to until you absolutely have to change it because everything is so messed up.

*N.B. the counter on my email now says “699” because I paused halfway through this post to check an email

Recording Analog in the Digital Age

One of my favorite bands, The Foo Fighters, is widely known for their quirkiness in their early days. They always pushed the limits and did stuff that everyone else was afraid to do. They were known for having funny music videos where the members of the band would dress up in costumes and overplay all of their actions. If you look back at them, they’re actually really funny. 

Fast forward 15 years. The Foos are getting ready to record their 7th studio album. Dave Grohl being Dave Grohl, decides to do something unexpected. He decides that they’re going to record the album in his garage. Well, not just his garage, but his whole damn house. With the drums set up in the garage, the console set up in the living room, and vocal booth set up in a large closet, they begin recording. Oh, did I mention they’re also recording to tape?

Something most people may not realize is, when artists today record a song, they have an unlimited number of tracks to record on. That is because all of the recording and audio mixing is done digitally, most often in a program called ProTools. Other popular digital recording softwares include Garageband (if you have a Mac, it comes pre-installed), and Reaper. Because the Foos are recording to tape, they have a limited number of tracks available because the analog equipment can only handle so many. 

In an age where everything is done digitally, this is a bold move. All of the members of Foo Fighters, aside from guitarist Pat Smear, are used to recording on digital, which gives you a lot more control over the music you’re playing and mixing. When you record to analog, everything has to be lined up and recorded perfectly because there’s no moving any tracks around after recording is stopped.

The album, Wasting Light, went on to be nominated for 5 Grammy awards, and won Best Rock Album. (source)

I may be a few years late on this one, but GG Foo Fighters. Keep doing you.

Computers and the Music Industry

With advances in technology come both improvements to society and some things that society could probably do without. One such example can be found in the music industry. If you look back into the 80’s, when technology was nowhere near as advanced as it is now (duh), you find, what some argue to be, some of the greatest musicians that defined the generation. Some of the greats include Bon Jovi, Queen, Van Halen, the list goes on. As a side note, Nirvana was formed in 1987 in Seattle. All of the bands I have mentioned used actual instruments and the members had actual talent. It was only occasionally, and only for support, that they would use any kind of computer to add to their music. Synths. I can think of at least one song from each of the above bands, sans Nirvana, that used a synth, especially Van Halen.

Once you start to get into the 90’s and 00’s is when, in my opinion, things start to take a turn for the worse. Boy Bands like N*SYNC and The Backstreet Boys start to arise and attempt to show that you don’t need instruments or real voices or talent to become a popular musician. While they did prove that to be right, in my opinion, they were nowhere near as talented as other bands in the 90’s such as Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, for example. 

However, things continue to take a turn for the worse when get to the late 00’s and early 10’s. A technique arises that will forever change, and possibly plague, the music industry forever. Autotune. Various artists like Ke$ha (or, as she goes now, at time of writing, Kesha), Akon, Chris Brown, and, dare I say it, Rebecca Black resort to this technique to try to firther their careers. With the birth and rise in popularity of autotune, you can see something very interesting start to happen. Because of the easily reproducible notes and effects on all songs on the charts, this brings the rise to the YouTube spoof trend. 

With the rise of YouTube in the late 00’s, countless people begin creating accounts and uploading content. Obviously, not all of them will rise to fame, but the ones who do, I would say, define a generation. Striving to gain viewers’ attention, these content creators start to look for ways to turn some heads towards their content. This is when the rise of the YouTube spoof begins to happen. YouTubers such as Shane Dawson and iJustine begin to turn to popular music to gain attention.

Somehow, we started off with musical greats like Bon Jovi and Queen, and ended up Shane Dawson’s YouTube spoofs. This just goes to show you how great of a social impact computerized music has had in the past few decades. With this in mind, I cannot even begin to imagine where music will be going in the future. Who knows, maybe somehow we’ll get back to 80’s Hair Metal.

New Technologies - Good Or Bad?

Technology is rapidly progressing. When you think about it, it's kind of scary. Recently, I've been forced to use an older phone, an iPhone 4S, due to my more up-to-date iPhone 5S breaking. I felt like I was stuck in the stone age. When the new iPhone 6S was announced, my anticipation for September 25th, the release date, skyrocketed. Now, I have the new phone and love it. This got me thinking, with the rapid progression of technology and simple, mundane tasks such as checking the weather become more and more easy and fast to complete, is this rapid growth necessarily a good thing?

When I think back to my early childhood, I remember playing outside with my friends, for the most part. The only technology-based activities I took part in were playing an online MMO game for kids, called ToonTown, chatting with some friends on AIM, and playing CD-ROM based computer games (on a side note, my favorite one of all time was this Tonka Truck video game that had this cool controller-type object that attached to the keyboard with lots of cool levers that corresponded with different tasks within the game). Other than that, most of my earliest memories involve playing with physical toys, or outside in the backyard with my friends.

Thinking about how kids today will remember their childhood, it’s kind of upsetting. Kids today, who are growing up with iPads and the like, are not going to know the annoyance on having to yell “CAR” while playing catch in the street. They’re not going to know the struggles of having to climb underneath cars to retrieve that ball that rolled under it. They’re not going to know the struggle of chasing a ball down a hill to catch it. They won’t understand that perfect time of day on a Saturday evening when the sky is orange and the weather is perfect. They will only know the struggles of not having a wifi signal, for example. They’ll only know the struggle of not having enough data to stream Tyler Oakley’s latest upload. And while both my generation and this generation experience struggles relating to their activities, at least in my generation, we were laughing with friends having a good time. Thinking ahead to the future, one could only imagine what struggles they will have to endure.

While all of this growing technology is great, it’s good to stop and think every now and then how it’s affecting the current youth. While there are a lot of educational apps and technologies out there, they are on the same platform as all of the games and other distractions, which makes it harder for children to learn to focus. Some interesting questions arise when thinking about this topic. Should an age limit be put on certain technologies? Should these age limits be put into effect, will they be viewed by this generation in the same way as the drinking age is viewed by my generation? Will this open up a whole market/reason to get a fade ID?