Everyday Digital Literacy: Where the “Decline” of Creative Expression Meets the “Rise” of Creative Technologies

In August 2011, the cramped quarters of a central Los Angeles office had been converted, for one week, into a mini–movie studio.

This was the fourth day of OMG! Cameras Everywhere, a nonprofit summer camp set up and run with as much improvisation as earnestness, conceived by a small, loose collective of young music video directors and realized by late August. The campers attended at no cost, and the counselors donated their time and equipment. Raised among friends, family, and industry acquaintances on Kickstarter, $4,500 provided food, a passenger van for outings and location shoots, and insurance.

Hiro Murai was there, helping the actresses and instructing the young camera operator; also Benjamin Kutsko, a music video director who is part of the music video collective the Masses. As well as, Alex Pelly, another Masses director who, in addition to her technical role as a marshmallow wrangler, had been cast as the girls’ mother.

Over the course of the week, the campers conceived, directed, and performed in five music videos, a live performance music video, and dozens of ultrashort films, ten seconds or less in length. The professional directors pulled an all-nighter editing the raw footage captured throughout the camp, and on the sixth day, they hosted a screening for their young collaborators, complete with a directors’ Q&A.

The basic idea for the camp, was the merging of the older group’s professional literacy and the kids’ potential literacy as music video producers. The twenty-somethings and the preteens shared an everyday familiarity with consumer digital camera technologies, as well as the pop cultural form of the music video itself. As OMG! explained, the program was founded upon the belief that the increased accessibility of cameras to everyone today can potentially give kids the tools they need to create and communicate like never before.

Murai and his fellow counselors, are at a thoughtful halfway point between the traditional methods of instruction that dominated their collective educations and the informal, networked methods and possibilities widely available to their millennial campers with the tap of a touch screen, so the directors of OMG! treated the camp as a referendum on what they felt were the most valuable parts of their creative educations. This choice identifies the developmental stage that Murai and his peers collectively value as their creative core: the age just before instinct and curiosity begin to be overcome by expectations of meaningfulness and productivity.

Murai, reflected on the overall experience of OMG! It just felt really intuitive, and at that age, with the kids, they shouldn’t be worried about how to pull focus or, like, worry about sequencing or editing. It should be all about what idea they have and how to execute that, or what is more from the gut.”

In so many words, Murai was contrasting process with product, intuition with pedagogy. As a professional artist teaching in an extracurricular setting, his concerns and priorities are more in line with those of an art school than a computer lab and represent an important alternative to educators with backgrounds in standardized, outcome-centered education leading projects on digital media production.