VLOGGING: GOOD OR BAD??
What is Vlog? It is the shortened term for video blog or video log and functions as a blog with video as its medium. It started in 2000 by Adam Kontras but this phenomena had started to get positive response in Malaysia around 2010 and now it becomes a common thing where almost everyone is a vlogger. Vlogging in Malaysia is usually famous among young adults and teenagers where they use it as a medium for sharing experiences, ideas, opinions and the most famous spot to find Malaysian vlog is on Youtube.
This current medium of getting your voice to be heard holds a very powerful influence to Malaysian. Why?Because people want stories that are true and people will believe what they see rather than what they hear. People want amusement, originality, freedom of speech, interactions and direct feedback that they could not find from television. People nowadays are getting tired of just feeding on the information from television but they want to participate in giving their own opinions and even hear other common people's opinion.That is why videos has become one of the most popular medium of information.
There are always two sides of every story and everything has its own pros and cons. From the positive point of view, we can say that even a young child can share his ideas or perspective about something to the whole world. Vlog is also the easiest way to make yourself popular and it is even beneficial for companies, products and brand. It is definitely a famous tool of publicity when it comes to public relation field. A video that is shared can become viral and can even get thousands of views in just an hour, thus vlog can be a very helpful medium when you want something to be spread to a large audience.
Any actions of either promoting a product or solving a conflict can be done by video log. Personal bloggers even use video log to interact with their viewers, create connections, and even earn money by attracting companies to do advertisement on their videos. The power of vlog can even prevent crime from happening and awaken justice. For example, this current video has been viral in just a day and now it became the most shared video among bloggers, facebook users and other social media.
Public is sharing this video and asking the authorities to take actions
on the bullies and in less than 24 hours after this video was uploaded, a
parody about this video has been made.
The same thing happened about the video regarding child abuse that had
attracted public's concern and forced medias to inform further
details of the video.
Besides standing up for justice, vlog is
commonly use to express personal perspective about something and these
types of video usually get huge hits in vlog channels. There are vloggers who
became popular and viewed as a role model especially by teenagers. For
example, we can see the top first ranked vlogger in Malaysia which is
Matlufi who is a Malaysia student studying in Perth, Australia. He uses
videos to express his perspective about common issues and manage to
attract a lot of viewers and even got the Shout Aloud Award. He even
accept invitation from local universities in Malaysia to give
motivational speeches during his holidays here. He also did a collaboration
video with Ready4Work to help fresh graduates in changing their typical
perception about getting jobs.
However, vlogging does have its own disadvantages such as irresponsible people re-uploading videos that have the elements of slanderism with negative intentions. These type of videos are usually shared for political purposes. Besides that, we can say that immature young teenagers is the victim when it comes to wrong usage of vlogging. They tend to get excited with the idea of having fame with just uploading videos and end up sharing actions or behavior that are not appropriate. Some of the vloggers even got criticism and humiliating comments. For example, this young girl video got huge criticism from other vloggers and viewers. She did get the fame but a humiliating one.
Thus vlogging is the current trend of spreading informations, ideas or any thing that you want to share but it does have its own pros and cons. So its up to the public to use it wisely. Happy vlogging!.
