The value of vlogs: past, present, and future

In the 20 years since its launch in 2005, millions of people around the world have gathered on YouTube, and later other platforms, to share and consume human experience through video. Vlogging has become a global phenomenon where ordinary individuals share their everyday lives online and, in doing so, build connection and community with others. Sharing life through video has resulted in a collective database of knowledge, memory, culture, movements, landscapes, and life. Vlogging, as we have come to know it, began in the early 2000s, enabled by the lightweight, portable, and increasingly affordable mobile phone featuring an inbuilt camera. Extending the practice of blogging – a personal, intimate, diary-like log of individual human experience on the public Internet, mainly in text form – vlogging offered the additional intimacy and authenticity of the audio-visual moving image. The vlog (video-blog) became a widely accessible, and wildly popular, medium for presenting the self, sharing life, and forming connection with others online.