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examination of the materials and processes of the specific communication’,55 in contrast to Marshall McLuhan, who famously proclaimed that the medium is the message, emphasising the importance of studying medium-based analyses of media as ‘it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium’.56 In his attempt to reconcile these positions, Silverstone argues that media is not either-or, but both material and symbolic – hence his notion of the media as doubly articulated. This book follows in this tradition by emphasising not just the content of videoblogs, but their materiality. This is done in three stages; firstly, by tracing the technical constellation around videoblogging we start to see the outline of the videoblogging platform articulated by competing and often normative ideas of how the platform ‘should be’ – and eventually the emergence of a hegemonic platform imaginary. Secondly, through a formal analysis of a number of video blogs, a particular aesthetic emerges; a medium-specific aesthetic which is both influenced by and works in conjunction with the technical restrictions of the platform. Finally, by conceptualising videoblogging as a media practice, materially performed through embodied experiences and discursively reflected upon by the participants themselves, we see the emergence of a videoblogger identity. I now want to turn to situating videoblogging historically in the next chapter to broaden and deepen these discussions in terms of specific case of videoblogs and the practices of videoblogging.
55 Williams, Television: technology and cultural form, p. vi (emphasis mine). 56 Marshall McLuhan, Understandig media. The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge, 1964: 9-11.