In an age when even your mobile telephone can make a short movie, amateur video filmmaking is ubiquitous. You can use your phone, webcam or a video camera  to make a videocast. All kinds of special software allows you then to refine the product into a movie of sorts, through the layering of film and audio tracks.  I’m sure a lot of you reading this know more about this subject than I do. I thought I’d check out what Runet users had been up to in this regard over the last couple of weeks. I found some interesting videocasts.The first thing of interest was this: America’s evangelists for democracy have a video challenge for internet users around the world. They've invited videocasts from Russia, among other countries, asking internet users to post video messages that articulate ‘what democracy means’ to them. I’m curious to find out what Runet users send in. ¹Have any of you come across kamikadze, a regular vlogger on rutube.ru? Today he has a vlog up, which is an account of the week’s news. It’s tongue-in-cheek and smartly mounted into a fast-paced vlog.The fact that television channels offer only one perspective of the news does not mean audiences co-opt those preferred perspectives. Through citizen media like vlogging and blogging the ‘audiences’ create and debate parallel visions of the political. Kamikadze’s vlog got close to 200 comments within a few hours of his posting the video today….and the conversation in the comments section seems far from over as I write this post.Vlogging in a way, I imagine, offers that much more potential to be creative about news. Kamikadze, for instance, does a neat montage of news clips, footage from old movies and other comic clips from television juxtaposed against his own rather caustic, ironic commentary, suggesting in this way how much (or rather, how little) importance we should attach to what the administration says.  I liked his style.¹The Latvian music group Brainstorm invited Runet users to make music videos of three of their hit songs, which would then win contestants an invitation to the release of Brainstorm’s new album on April 18.In the case of Brainstorm, we have no idea yet what they plan to do further with the videos submitted. So it might be premature to assume that this is an illustration of the democratization of artistic activity. But anchoring the already popular practice of fan music videos to their marketing strategy is an indication of the influence of cyber fandom on the previously sacrosanct and neatly compartmentalized roles of artist, marketing manager and audience....isn't it?

S.R