III: Vlogging as realization of automatic alertness

Some of the newest and most exciting forms of new media have come in the form of programs that automatically alert information is made available online. These come in the forms of XML feeds and rss readers, twitter (both as social media and link feed) and growing portability of the internet, which allows all of this information to flow. Using these, increasingly user friendly, automation programs, forms of documentary that are otherwise fascinating pieces of new media, now become serial pieces of the world around us that make documentary into a daily experience, and thus that much closer to resembling the world around us.

Vlogging is the best suited current form of new media for documentary, and while vlogs have different sub-categories that distinguish them as yet more different media forms, all vlogs can be subscribed to. Subscribing to a vlog is the closest thing I've experienced to the concept of automatic alertness documentary. My open email tab rings at me as I spend the morning scanning my favorite news feeds. I link the link to a new tab to see my favorite vlog covering current developments in the Bloomberg mayoral campaign has posted a new video of protesters outside of city hall. I watch the video and stay informed to events right after they happen according to my priorities (not a major news agency) and according to when I wake up.

Another, less journalistic, realization of this vision. I'm at a bar, talking to someone about a vlog that provides a different portrait of an ice skater everyweek. I'm not interested in ice skating, but my high school buddy has become a olympic skater, and would love to see the episdoe that he is on. I subscribe, forget the whole conversation and then suddenly get a buzz a month later at home when a tag with my friends name triggers an alert.

Besides vlogging, radio documentary, and the possiblility for organization on a shoestring (flash mobs) has been enabled by certain automation technologies. Our awareness is heightened, our consciousness changed. Audiences open up, and documentors find their audiences automatically.

I imagine that using twitter-like technologies one could, quite optionally, have whatever they were watching automatically set as their status message skipping the manual question of "what are you doing/watching."