On a somewhat related note: how come we, as a society, have never really adopted the daily "video log" (except for the YouTubers amongst us; the Neistat wannabes), but we have _heavily_ adopted the idea of the written journal?
Writing is cheap, portable, and available to anyone who can produce and process written script; the poorest child in the poorest country can be taught to write their ideas in a journal. Video is expensive: not just the personal device & storage account, but the entire infrastructure to support uploading, storing, and maintaining an always-accessible archive. It is also difficult to revisit video to search for previous ideas and thoughts, etc. Text is easy to index and search both in digital and analog formats (at least, if one gives forethought to indexing one's journals during or shortly after writing a journal entry).
Audio didn’t really catch on for journaling either; save podcasters. It’s reasonably easy to store for most of us on this platform. For most people it has the same search problem.
I used to take audio notes in the car, because it’s easy to do. But I never went back and listened. Maybe if it could be transcribed reasonably well it would work out. Some dictate to their phones quite a bit these days.
And dictating to a device that can provide accurate transcription such as an AI-enabled virtual assistant is just another way to get to the end product of a searchable, indexable digital text. I'd count this as keeping a written journal. Sure, the price of entry is higher than a pencil and a pad of newsprint paper, but it's written text.
An important part of journaling is the composition process. I have to explicitly structure a thought for it to make any sense in a written form. This is a slow, intentional process. I've had one-page journal entries take over an hour to compose and write, though I usually average 20 minutes per page.
In the limited number of attempts I've tried with audio journaling, it always comes across as stream-of-consciousness. I like to think out loud already, so I end up removing my anchor -- the written document -- and just chase one thought after another after another. I don't see how I'd be able to maintain the quality of my journal (or other written works) if I didn't have my easily re-referenced existing document.
Have you had success with audio/video journals? Any tips?
Sure, there's a difference between stream-of-consciousness note-taking/idea capture of brain babble and composing cohesive thoughts in a coherent manner.
But the nice thing is that a journal can be either or both, often at the same time. I think the most important thing about writing a daily journal is that the act of writing things down itself is a way of processing the thoughts and attempting to make sense of them.
I'm talk to myself too much to even attempt an audio or video journal. Speech to text certainly has it's usefulness, but I can't help thinking that video journaling borders more on performance than capturing/expanding/exploring ideas and thoughts. I'm sure there's lots of filmmakers and documentarians who'll disagree with me on that, though.
I use this workflow for capturing design ideas: phone voice recorder -> whisper -> hand cleanup -> outline or second draft, depending where I am in the problem space. I have a major to-do to get a llm set up to do a first cleanup pass but haven’t had the urge since I got the first parts working. I could also stand to write automation glue to replace some shell history but it functions remarkably well for me.
Depending on the day I’ll do my journaling through dictation on my phone or iPad while I exercise. There isn’t a video component but I’m guessing that the speaking component is more of what you’re bringing up.
As other commenters have said, it ends up more like a stream of consciousness and not something well thought out. My word choice isn’t as good. The prose just kind of sucks. I don’t learn much about myself from these sorts of entries.
This is something I’ve simply accepted will happen because I do this on days that I don’t have time to sit in front of a keyboard for 30m. Maybe having more well defined prompts would help improve the quality of these entries. I’m not sure.
Remember those wedding or birthday parties catch with camcorders on Super8 or VHS?
Then see that requirement for video log was high compared to nowadays were most people have a smartphone and they exist platforms like youtube/vimeo/facebook/etc for storage and sharing. If you have privacy concerns, it's still not a viable solution unless you have some computers management backgrounds (and can afford investments in storage and backup.)
On the other hand, pencils and notebooks were affordable. Once you knew writing, paper journal was most obvious than self video. If you wanted to make the journal available to public, blog was a thing (like vlog is today.)
However, on heavy adoption, not everybody use to log…
Also note that as handwriting decrease while typewriting increase, written journal become digital.
writing in a journal, you put your thoughts into something. akin to a deposit in a bank.
recording yourself with a device such as a camera or microphone, the device is taking your thoughts and putting them inside of itself. implicitly, you are more vulnerable.
but times change, and with them so does access to the necessary technology. you haven’t yet reached the terminus. enjoy the ride.
If you (or anyone reading this) have any interest in doing this, consider e-mailing me (e-mail in my profile) and I might have something very compelling for you. I journal like this all the time now and so does my team. :)