Vernacular Video

Kids today!

(The photo above shows some of the cast of the new Channel 4 series Skins, a show I'll be interested to see since for years I produced teen-targeted soap opera. But that's another story.)

Kids today, do many of them not have imaging devices? Ubiquitous video enabled mobile phones will bring about a quantum leap in do-it-yourself media making. Which I find exciting.

Others, though, are more bearish. Tom Sherman (cited by both Bruce Sterling and Xeni Jardi which basically means 'sit up, pay attention'!) writes 2,000 words on what he calls Vernacular Video.

Webcams and video-phones, video-blogs and video-podcasting will fuel a twenty-first-century tidal wave of vernacular video.

The pundit predicts mayhem as vid-cams proliferate in the hands of the masses, from "music-video-crazed digital cooperatives" to "hordes of Sunday video artists."

He doesn't sound happy.