Kids Today

Teen media, social media, instant messaging, podcasts – all terms I’ve become familiar with over the last three months when I assumed the role of program manager at a media literacy organization. At the time, I was terribly old school. I’m a woman of a certain age, one who remembers sticking two pieces of celluloid together with a bit of tape. Sometimes I still miss the tactile quality of physically attaching two scenes together. Film had a weird, chemical smell that I grew to love the way I learned to love how my dog smelled after getting caught in a rainstorm. I’m a member of the last generation of filmmakers who cut their teeth on celluloid.

Twenty years ago I could never have imagined the possibilities that the digital revolution has brought to the world. When I look at the young filmmakers at their Mac editing stations, easily transforming a ho-hum scene into a tour de force through the addition of wild graphics, and their own Garageband composed soundtrack, I can only marvel. Sometimes, though, I also think about Vertov and his movie camera and how the Russians revolutionized the language of film by creating a style out of the short ends of the film rolls they were forced to use. In my days at film school, the students who worked with celluloid were the elite. The economy of film was such that you could only do one or two takes before you ran out of cab fare. It made for a certain discipline and preplanning. There was rarely anything extra to toss onto the cutting room floor. We filmmakers would sit through the work of videomakers as though sitting through some type of psychic torture. Video cameras could roll and roll and cost nothing. In fact, you could always tape over what you didn’t like. It was nothing like the precious content of our, round, flat, tin cans.

Now I’m looking at the films of kids who have never touched a piece of celluloid. There’s a definite feel to their films that was absent from my own and those of my peers. The change is something like a switch between classical to jazz. Sometimes you get the entire story in one take and its beautiful, like watching Fred Astaire and Cyd Charise in those luxurious long takes that proved their artistry was no camera’s slight of hand. More likely though, you get the mistakes, the moment when an actor falls out of character. Is it more real? Maybe, but not in the sense of truth, more in the sense of poetry. What emerges in teen media is akin to a John Cassavetes movie. Cassavetes’ hallmark was his use of improvisation, which always opened up onto a type of vulnerability. There was always a danger of the unknown lurking beneath the surface, as though reality were about to crack the film wide open. I see the same vulnerability in my Teen-TV hosts. There are always moments when they lose their practiced cool and become just what they are, kids mugging for the camera, trying hard to keep up their host personas.

The short ends used by the Russians created a fragmented style that matched their revolutionary fervor as well as the industrial, processes of the time. The quick cuts were akin to the segmented quality of assembly line production. Film Noir, on the other hand, was born of post-war pessimism. The hard-boiled heroes of those films existed in a world of deep focus and deep shadows of uncertainty. Still, film was a rarified space, open only to a few.

There have been other filmic revolutions—Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave and Super-eight—but never has media technology been so easy or cheap to operate. So, what’s different about a world saturated by media? For one thing, I see young people slipping in and out of media space at a moment’s notice. There is no rarified space reserved for serious filmmakers. Instead there are camera phones and You Tube. Of course, there is still a digital divide, but schools are working to close that gap and are beginning to see media training as a necessary part of education. What has come to be known as media literacy is much more than just learning to be a critical viewer, it is also learning how to create your own media, something these kids have been doing without formal training throughout their adolescent lives. Social media is the lingua franca among today’s teens and schools are only slowly catching on.

In the program I manage, the data shows a marked increase in standardized test scores, GPAs, and attendance among the kids who partake in media classes. Media is more than just a hook to get kids to show up for class, although it does serve that purpose. (Attendance is half the battle in getting good grades.) Yet teachers often resist bringing new media into the classroom because it requires a very different approach, one which mirrors the contemporary workplace, which emphasizes teamwork above singular achievement. Moviemaking is almost always groupwork done in intense, small teams, and it requires students to ask questions and to find their own answers as well as create innovative ways to express their research findings. It’s a lot riskier than lecturing.

This blog will look at teen media in close-up. We will hear from young filmmakers, teachers, and researchers in the field. I will ask how the social and economic conditions under which teen media is produced effects its form. I will look at how teens go about creating media. Is there a gender gap in the use of media technology? What relationships emerge among teen filmmakers in the course of making media? Is education being transformed by the addition of new technologies? There are no hard and fast answers to these questions. The media landscape changes too fast for any certainty, but I find myself in the unique position of being able to witness the daily grind of high school and the details of teen media production.

Note: I’m blowing my own horn here, but the organization I work for, Home, Inc., and the Department of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are having a conference that will delve into all these questions on October 27th at MIT's Tang Center in Cambridge, Mass. In a media saturated world, it is a rare opportunity for researchers and practitioners to meet face to face and to exchange ideas about the world of social media and teen media production. (The conference will, of course, be available by podcast after the event.)

Blogger Barbara Woloch is a program manager for an initiative to teach media skills to kids

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