Becoming Screen Literate: video editing, mashups, and image creation

Thanks to Brett for sending along the link to this NY Times article about how screen culture has evolved. "Becoming Screen Literate" discusses the ease and prevalence of video editing tools, their link to textual literacy, and how this is playing out in popular culture.

Among other things, the article discusses mashups, (for those unfamiliar with mashups- check one out here and read about them on Wikipedia) explaining that, "the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases."

Editing video and sound from various sources to create a new whole with its own separate meaning strikes me as not unlike an enhanced podcast that borrows music and images from various sources and uses them to make meaning in conjunction with an original audio text. Better yet, if you're not fully satisfied with the images you find on the Web, you can alter and mash them up using photoshop to better suit your podcast.

According to the Times article, this image mashing "is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images."