Vlogs and Vlogging

A few days ago, I wanted to see how the noble and price-gouging people of Venice live in Venice. I was really wondering (and still am). I did a search on YouTube, I saw only one option that wasn't a Venice travel guide, and that was a YouTube channel for a lady who made vlogs. There I said to myself, Oh Azadi! Oh perpetual loser of this world and the hereafter. You always judged too quickly. Finally, a vlogger (I call bloggers who make vlogs, vloggers) came and lit a lamp in this dark ignorance. Did you get put in your place, did it serve you right?!

Hidden from God it isn't, and why hide it from you, it was absolute nonsense! And it was yet another stamp of approval on the worthlessness of the content produced by minor yellow vloggers who have sprouted like mushrooms from every door and wall and all copy from each other. The vlog couldn't even give me a shadow of the shape of life in Venice and was stuck in the meaningless and fake minor details of the vlogger. I only realized that Her Highness goes to the library to study and, ummmmm, drinks her beverage from her cute mug so her body doesn't get dehydrated. Ah! She also goes to a cafe in the middle of it with her cute friend to have coffee and cake. At night she goes and enjoys some street music. Oh, how cute! Right? No! No! No!

It doesn't matter if you live in a village or a metropolis. Wherever you are, there is a vlogger with puffy, just-woken-up eyes looking at their phone camera and delivering a slimy and sticky "Heeeee llooo" to you. Part of my problem is here that a large population of these are people from whom, if they put their phones away, expecting the most ordinary human behavior is asking too much. So much so that from their unanswered greeting, you consider yourself deserving of punishment.

Shahnaz, who is trying to become a highly-viewed blogger on YouTube and Instagram, starts her work by taking us into her house and wants to acquaint us with the cost of living in the city where she lives. First, we go to get ready together for Shahnaz to put on her makeup, and in the middle of it, she makes artistic click-clack sounds on her cosmetics with her artificial nails for us, which melts our hearts.

After a hundred cuts, now Shahnaz has done a "light" university/lab/employee makeup, and takes us, whose hands and feet are still wet from those acts with her cosmetics, along with her to stare at her daily coffee drinking at their local cafe/Starbucks. On the way, she tells us about her house rent money and the hard life she has left behind :-( (When Shahnaz was in Iran, she lived in an upscale neighborhood, and now with the money her family sends her monthly, she has managed to scrape together a good life and home). We start with a sequence of the cafe atmosphere and finish the job by wiping bread at the bottom of the cappuccino cup and reading its receipt. Now we are all going together to get ready to board the bus that wants to take Shahnaz to the university, and lend our souls' ears to Shahnaz's profound points about public transportation. Shahnaz, who is an engineer, only deals with numbers and figures and gives us a series of numbers about the price of Uber based on distance to the destination and departure time coefficient, and on the other hand, like a seasoned lawyer, tells us about the clauses of getting discounts on public transport, and we, fingers in our mouths and out of intense passion, wishing this bus would never reach its destination.

Shahnaz, who unlike always when she picks up the phone is very well-spoken and extroverted, brings us further into her life and tells us about her day's schedule. It's unbelievable, isn't it?! Shahnaz, who was not on speaking terms even with herself until yesterday, has now become so chummy with us that she wants to take us to watch her study!! From the sheer excitement, my hand unconsciously and pointlessly keeps crossing out words as I write... She puts us at the corner of the desk, so that at the bottom of the frame, we have her colorful and cute stationery, and simultaneously her pale three-quarter profile which is studying hard and trying! trying! trying! What an unparalleled frame!! I bet you will never get this rare shot out of your mind.

Now it's time for us to find out how much food costs in Shahnaz's city. In terms of content production power, Shahnaz goes head-to-head with the greatest documentarians of BBC and National Geographic. A narrative documentary that will surely glue you to your monitor. Handheld camera work and masterpiece POVs from the moments of buying bread in the store to the breathtaking moments of choosing between chicken and eggs from the store's refrigerator, and the narrator's voice (narrated by Shahnaz) which in a calm tone, in a scene where breath is held in the chest from excitement, says: "Ummmmmm I don't know which of these to choose"... reminds me of David Attenborough's masterpieces. And all these serve the final sequence:

Shahnaz has now come home and is sitting on the bed. She is tired. Softening the light and her speaking softly have doubly helped set the mood and make us empathize more with her. Then, by giving a summary of her day, now it's time to end the suspense she has brilliantly built for us so far and take us to the final act: reading the shopping receipt and stating the cost.... That's right. The moment everyone was waiting for finally arrives and Shahnaz reads the numbers one by one for us, and at the end, an extreme close-up of the price printed on the store receipt... and done. A work that even in its ending rubs shoulders with masterpieces like Hitchcock's Psycho.

I guess that at least one of the vloggers you have seen here and there crossed your mind, and well, if so, this is bad news. It's bad news because the problem lies exactly here. That even weaker copies are made from the weakest ideas that can be implemented. From the themes and thumbnails that are made for videos to the topics that are addressed. Narrative styles are entirely copied and uniform.

Inherently, in my opinion, blogging is not only not a bad thing but can also be very fascinating. That same Venice example I started with. A vlog could have answered my question about life in Venice very unmediatedly and gone a step further and given me the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding relative to a Venetian citizen and their more serious challenges which probably cannot be found in documentaries. I think transmitting first-hand life experience is very good and essential and, of course, precious. I argue this way that everyone's life experience is different from anyone else's, and the story that I, as an individual, tell is definitely tailored to my worldview. If I am to have a narrative of what happened to me, it certainly and logically must arise from the perspective I have. If I fall into copying and tampering with the narrative to supposedly make it fascinating, this will no longer be my life experience. Because I want to tell a story that everyone told and sold, and now it's my turn to sell it. And naturally, this story is certainly not worth a dime. That's why I say that a blogger who doesn't have their own narrative style or doesn't have their own narrative at all, their work is not only unworthy of respect and encouragement but deserves sharp and biting critiques.