Dr John McMullan

Traditionally, the term 'jump cut' has described film or video edits that jump forward in time and detract from a sense of continuity. In the early days of online video platforms, such as YouTube, video bloggers employed jump cuts while editing their direct-address monologues to allow them to string together the best parts of the performance. It could even be said now that jump cutting a monologue is one of the inherent conventions of vlogging. This paper argues that vlogging culture has not only adopted the jump cut as core to its productions, but also adapted and evolved it for specific vlog use. The vlogging space is rich in moving image innovation and instances of this, such as the vlogging jump cut, need to be identified, analysed, and discussed - just as occurred for cinema and television during their past periods of emergence.

For the last few decades, media theorists have been faced with the understanding that the networked digital computer is the meta-medium to end all mediums. This places researchers in the curious position where online platforms, such as YouTube, cannot legitimately and directly be contrasted with traditional analogue mediums, such as cinema and television. To address this inconsistency, I developed the theory of foundation technologies and their respective proto-affordances, which demonstrates the existence of past periods of ‘new media’. These were brought about by the introduction of key technologies that each offered, at the time, a new and unique underlying affordance to a society. Each new ‘proto-affordance’ inspired social disruption, as new specific mediums were spawned – each remediating existing mediums of similar mode. This framework shows digitality as another evolutionary step in a line of foundation technologies, which includes the artefact, the machine and electricity. The theory of foundation technologies permits software-based online platforms, such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Twitter, to be called digital mediums, and thus aids in understanding their technological substrate and unique affordances. Justifying this relation between old mediums and new, digital, ones equips us to more effectively comprehend and analyse these platforms as to their social adoption and uses, cultural practices, implications and effects. This allows us to better understand and control our present, and even guide our potential future.

Cinema as the projected filmic image has been the focus of moving image theory for over a century. Television and video have taken a back seat for several reasons; in particular that they are often considered as inferior moving image mediums in some aspects, both conveying a lesser degree of transparency and, more recently in digital form, being devoid of indexicality as theorised by Charles Sanders Pierce. That is, they supposedly possess a weaker connection to the real or, what Jay David Bolter calls, “the authentic”. This paper, via Tom Gunning’s work on digital media and the claim to photographic truth, will explore and problematise these notions with the aim of challenging the longstanding primacy of the cinematic moving image as well as softening the analog/digital divide.