We're Ready for a New Sincerity

The parts I've devoured on the train ride home Friday of the new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation by J.D. Lasica really speak to me. Here's some clues why:

"If you go back one hundred years, most media were personal media," observes Henry Jenkins of MIT. "The impulse to create stories or make up songs or paint pictures is what culture wants. There was a brief moment in human history where mass culture pushed the other stuff out of the way. Somehow we became convinced that only a few special people have talents or visions worth pursuing."

[...]

All of us, [Joe Lambert, founding director of the Center for Digital Storytelling] says, have been taught that only the experts can create media, that it is somehow off-limits to hobbyists and amateurs. But the center's message is a simple one: we all have a powerful story to tell. As Lambert puts it, "The twentieth century was about being talked to in the language of film and television. It was about a cynical, commercial-driven media machine filtering what we were allowed to watch. At some point, we'll grow tired of watching 'reality TV' and we'll latch onto people's authentic stories of reality. In the new century, all of us get a chance to talk back. We'll be the authors of our own stories."

[...]

A few of us [digital storytelling workshop participants] have scribbled some ideas, and we begin to discuss our rough-hewn scripts in a grou setting - a surprisingly positive session that helps us find the stripped-down, emotional center of our stories.

[...]

"We try to discourage the notion that film production is a worrisome, monumental undertaking, dealing with lighting, sound, characters, and setting," Lambert says. "You don't need all the fancy apparatus as long as you have an effective narrative. I don't mean slides of your summer vacation - that's the kind of superficial use of media we all fear. We're looking for something deeper. We're ready for a new sincerity."

Comments

[JD Lasica]

I was struck by Joe's term, "a new sincerity," as soon as I heard him say it. Scribbled it down.

Glad you're liking the book, Evelyn.