The New Media Collective: CHARLES HOPE, blip.tv

The newest NMC segment, MEDIA MINDS, will feature those at the forefront of new media who've dedicated themselves to the creation and expertise of the technology that allows us to do what we do in the blogosphere.

In this first installment, we're talking with Charles Hope, one of the founders of blip.tv. A usually quiet and laid back brother, Charles really opens up about himself, blip.tv, and his view of the world.

blip.tv is a video sharing site whose goal, according to its website, is to change the world by bringing videoblogging to the masses. I don't know about the world, but it's sure given me a great place to keep my videos.

What is blip.tv, and how did you get involved with it?
In a nutshell, blip.tv is the easiest place for videobloggers to upload their videos. I'm one of the co-founders. We were working on building some blogging software, but in the Spring of 2005 we discovered videoblogging and realized we'd found a perfect fit for our project. With very little work we adapted what we had for videoblogging, and created the first dedicated videoblogging platform. Before blip.tv people had to upload their videos to the Internet Archive, create a blog somewhere else, and then join the two together. We built a complete solution for videoblogging and the only one developed in close contact with the videoblogging community.

As one of blip.tv's co-founders, what role do you play there? Do you have a title? Explain some of what you do.
Our structure remains rather egalitarian, and we don't have titles other than co-founder. I work on strategy and software, [concerning things] such as the ability to accept video from mobile phones.

Is blip.tv your full time job? If not, what do you do?
I have a "day job" which I like very much, writing niche business software.

Are you a videoblogger? If so, how did you get into vlogging?
I am a videoblogger, and I got into it by spending a Saturday watching the work of Richard Bluestein, Dylan Verdi, and Ryanne Hodson. I was excited by this new genre, and it reminded me of a wonderful show that used to be on public access in the early '90s in Manhattan called The Church of Shooting Yourself. This fellow called Rik Little used to go around the Lower East Side and film the riots that were going on as the Administration emptied out the squats. And he'd aim the camera at himself as he walked down the street muttering to himself like a madman. His slogan was "shoot yourself because nobody else will." So it was this compelling combination of gonzo journalism and public access wackiness.

I'm also influenced by another early '90s Manhattan public access show called Concrete TV, which was a half-hour show composed of small clips assembled together semi randomly. These cuts were from old cowboy movies, karate movies, Bollywood, porno, Richard Simmons exercise films, and lots of explosions; everything all smashed together into the humorous equivalent of a Skinny Puppy song.

(See Knot Magazine article about Manhattan public access.)

What kinds of stuff do you vlog about, and where can we find your videoblog?
Sometimes I like to take little moments of life, like the bats flying above my apartment building, or subway rats grazing in a tunnel. Other times I'll video an event such as my friends belly dancing. And other times I make Concrete TV-style collages from random video clips that would otherwise have ended up on the cutting room floor. I like what I call "architecture porn"; gratuitous shots of buildings that I think have lovely lighting or geometry.

[You can find my videoblog at] http://chope.blip.tv. [And for the record], I only use legal music for which I've gotten usage permission from the artist.

Who is Charles Hope outside of blip.tv and the vlogosphere? What's life like for you in the real world?
I'm your average Brooklyn yuppie, only I come from Hell's Kitchen instead of Massachusetts, and I prefer Jungle to the Postal Service.

As my arms are injured from years of typing, I've dictated this entire interview using speech recognition software. I really don't know why everyone's not using it, injury or no. It's really quite good!

As a person of color, how do you feel about the digital divide? Do you believe it's closing? If not, what do you believe can, or should, be done about it, and who's responsibility is it to bridge the gap?
What a topic! I could talk about this for several hours. Information technology is a radical movement; far more powerful and subversive than any People's uprising that has ever occurred. In several short decades it has destabilized industries that are central to our way of life, and it's only getting started! When it's through we will be leading a bizarre lifestyle that is totally unrecognizable to us in the present era. In the meantime however, industries are being created and destroyed. I wouldn't advise a young person to think about becoming a travel agent or a music industry executive! Yet there are unprecedented opportunities available with the tiniest amounts of capital outlay; computers are cheap and education is free on the Internet. College is totally not needed to succeed in the world of today's Web.

Having grown up here in New York I've known people from all over the class spectrum, and the clearest divide that I've observed lies with the expectations of a person's primary social environment. Some people come from homes where failure is simply not an option. Others grow up in families where failure will be excused with explanations of the system being stacked against them. This has a stronger correlation to success than any other consideration I've noticed. So the divide exists mostly on a cultural, family, or individual level.

A factor specific to the African American subculture has to do with the construction of masculinity, the importance placed upon being masculine, and what activities are included in masculinity. I understand that in University today, two out of every three black students are female. I suppose the college lads aren't complaining, but the rest of us should see that we have some gender issues that need addressing, and clearly they lie outside the explanatory power of the Patriarchy model! We're going to have to be brave enough to consider a gender dynamic other than one of male domination and female oppression.

I know blip.tv's mission is to bring videoblogging to the masses, but why is this important? How do you see videoblogging changing the world?
Videoblogging, and blogging in general, represents an expansion and redefinition of "media." Media used to be scarce: TV networks were few in number, and no region was served by more than a handful of newspapers. Filtering was imposed by the Big Business sensitivities of corporate sponsors, an FCC periodically on the rampage, vulnerability to boycotts and letter storms, and the ever-tightening noose of Political Correctness.

A second level of filtering was put in place by the journalistic requirement of "objectivity," whereby if a vociferous faction insisted the moon was made of green cheese, reporters would be obliged to include a green cheese expert whenever the matter was discussed. A side effect is that we saw very little of what daily life was like, subjectively, in other societies or other parts of our own society.

Now that the tools have been put within reach of the Great Unwashed, there's this huge liberation as knowledge gets out from under the old obstacles, and as anyone can effectively run their own newspaper or TV station, media is now infinite and all viewpoints are available. This new first-person journalism, and the erosion of the distinction between journalism and diary writing, lets us glimpse people's truth directly.

I think that the first major impact that this new media will have on our society is at the ballot box. In the old days the key to electoral success was to play toward the center, whose discourse was represented by the mainstream media; sober, responsible and not given to the ideological excesses of right or left. But blogs are not limited by any such pretense of objectivity, and dual echo chambers have formed on the Internet as like-minded blogs link to each other and reinforce their ideological purity. It's a breeding ground for fanaticism, and I think it is polarizing the Democrat and Republican bases further away from each other, to the dismay of their elected representatives who have to balance theory and practice. Now we have a situation where the two sides not only disagree on matters of opinion, but also matters of fact. And consequently, electoral success now reflects the ability to mobilize one's own base with hysterical rhetoric, the vanishing moderate center be damned!

Thoughts from Charles' blog:
Some Thoughts on Democracy + Broadband
Beltway vs. Mass Politics in the Naughties
Bringing Down Governments With Ringtones
This Is My truth Tell Me Yours

What are some of your personal goals regarding blip.tv? What would you like to accomplish there?
If this were the '90s, I'd say World Domination. I'm afraid I don't know what this decade's slogan is.

Outside of blip.tv projects, what's else would you like to accomplish?
I'd like to figure out how to disguise my video camera so I can capture some of the absurdity of daily life. Yesterday I was riding the subway across from a woman holding a serious conversation with herself, and at the next stop a fellow sat down right next to her and began one with himself. If you're talking to yourself in a noisy place, do you have to speak above the din to be heard?

Is there anything new coming up at blip.tv that we should be watching for?
We just signed a contract with a new bandwidth provider, so our delivery is going to be faster and more stable now. The next thing you'll notice in the upcoming months is a gradual redesign of the website in order to highlight some of the features which at this point may require a bit of digging to find. And also, soon we are going to connect our tagging with Mefeedia, so when you upload a video to blip and tag it, if you've registered your blip videoblog with Mefeedia, then your tags will magically show up there as well!