Diverse Literacies

This week’s New Yorker has a review of “Be Kind Rewind” (the latest Jack Black opus), and - one assumes this is in protest - Anthony Lane spends practically no time on the film. I count two columns. But even in tiny spaces Lane can say revelatory things, viz,

The outcome is a strangely sundered one, torn between the claims of nostalgia and a desperate bid to seduce the YouTube generation. There are thousands of people doing what Mike and Jerry do, but few of them would even know what a video was, preferring to shoot on digital and post their spoofs online. This user-generated content, as it is called, marks either a long-overdue democratization of the arts or, if you prefer, a mass proliferation of the mediocre, and Gondry had the opportunity to rise above it by crafting a thoroughly professional fable about amateurs.

It need hardly be mentioned that Mr. Lane believes that Michel Gondry (the director of “Be Kind”) dropped the ball. But his description-cum-dismissal of DIY content is what interested me. While it’s true that a great deal of it is awful, the proliferation of content creators (mediocre or not) is remarkable not for the talent displayed but the zeal and dedication committed to the task. In a world of anonymous critics (who have none of Mr. Lane’s restraint), people are putting themselves out there in striking, funny, and sometimes deeply personal ways. Moreover, they are archiving and reconfiguring ephemera as it lands, so that the practice of culture jamming is now practically in real time. Not even the biggest media organizations have the same reaction time, and what’s more, they don’t care half as much.

One fundamental lesson is that the narrative vehicle of choice has shifted beyond the staccato nonsense of, say, Entertainment Tonight. YouTube’s “related videos” feature allows deeper dives into a single subject than a TV segment can provide, while also stretching the boundaries of “relevant” for a given user. And relevance is key, here. We can decry the average YouTuber for being so interested in random crap, or we can look for ways to engage the digital generations in ways that reach them. This is not merely a question of being “with it” but an entirely new type of media literacy, one that most of us ignore or (at best) treat as coffee break fodder.

That attitude will serve us poorly in the times to come. Anthony Lane can dismiss it all because he’s a film reviewer for the New Yorker, and therefore carries the torch for thousands of jaded urbanites for whom the chain-emailed link is so 2002. But the rest of the nation is only now glomming on, and subcultural moves are afoot. What’s your medium/message/contribution?