I Don't Know What To Say!

Ever since the dawn of movies, and on into the advent of television, we've expected and assumed that the screens we place ourselves in front of will two things for us:

entertain and/or inform.

Until the personal computer put a screen on everyone's work and home desk, we've sat passively and let the info come to us. Someone had to create that info, but those people were way far away, in Hollywood, or in some TV station somewhere. The manpower, equipment, and overhead for creating this info was so expensive it could only be done by people in groups who had access to large amounts of money. And who had successfully broken through the barriers to entry, which were (and in some cases continue to be) quite formidable.

We spectators really had no say in what that info was, how it was created, who it went to, and how it made us feel. We may have thought we had a say - look at how many people have opinions on who wins Academy Awards - but that was all we had. Opinions.

Then a funny thing happened. Those screens on our desks - they started working two ways. Back and forth. Like the postal service at first, then in ways that started to eclipse the status quo. And we were not ready for that. Especially since we were waiting for those screens on our desks to talk to us in the same old way.

We're so used to movies and television that we don't remember - because most of us were around when they began - the time when those screens didn't know how to talk to us.

Take D.W. Griffith. Before he started directing movies at the beginning of the 20th century, the few narrative, story telling films were short, static affairs. Visionaries like Georges Melies and Edwin S. Porter experimented with telling some wild tales, but they kept the camera locked down in one spot, basically filming the story as if it was being presented on stage. It took D. W. Griffith, director of the controversial Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, to start presenting movies to us that were governed by a language, a grammer, in which establishing shots, close ups, different camera angles and film editing which laid the basis for a brand new way of communicating.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Griffith:
Whether or not he actually invented new techniques in film grammar, he seems to have been among the first to understand how these techniques could be used to create an expressive language.

We've forgotten how big this was. We're so used to this kind of storytelling, we accept editing and closeups and all that intrinsically - we never notice the nouns and verbs being used - we just understand the meaning that's presented to us.

Why do I go back so far and explain this? I was thinking how, now that the costs of getting the information out to people is so much lower than it has been for 100 years, many of us assume that the Web and the Internet are there on our screens to do exactly what Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, and the CBS Evening News have been doing. Informing and entertaining us, while we sit passively.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many people aren't at all sure how to actually USE these new tools? Are we asking people too much when we get frustrated that they don't immediately grasp the immense capabilities they have in their hands? Are we expecting them to be like Orson Welles, who once said about RKO Studio "This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" - and then go on to create the Internet equivalent of Citizen Kane?

Some of us have, through years of study and some lucky breaks, enough experience and capabilities with the old screen production methods. We may have a leg up on some of this stuff. Still, it's hard not to be reduced to a younger age at times. We're still like a motormouthed four-year old who, when given the opportunity to speak into a microphone, suddenly clams up!