Here, Martin Scorsese is eloquent in discussing the importance of film literacy ...

… but I want to take what he says about film literacy a bit further.

Scorsese is an artist and wishes he lived in a world where children grew up with a deeper understanding of his art. That’s understandable, but to draw a parallel, our rationale for introducing children to Hemingway or Salinger is not that we want to improve the readership of Hemingway or Salinger.

We expose our children to literature because those kids are going to grow up and start writing emails to each other and to us. We want emails written by people that have a depth appreciation of language. We want to live in a world where the emails that we receive are pleasing to us.

Similarly, YouTubes composed by people with a depth appreciation of film are more compelling, and over the last couple of decades, there has been a radical democratization of video, and we need to start caring about kids that are going to grow up to become participants in that democracy.

Capture no longer involves massive roles of film. Footage can go straight to cloud storage if you want, and cameras are small enough to fall down a sink drain. Sound and video editing no longer involve a developer and a cutting room, and can be done on a laptop, or even on a cellphone. Ways to distribute your content abound.

Video is not just a valuable tool for “communicating with the world,” it has become a vital internal communications tool for even small companies such as ProGEN. Rather than getting everyone together in a room at the same time, dimming the lights, and narrating a powerpoint to them, it’s a lot easier to send out a YouTube link for each person to watch in a moment when s/he can give it her/his full attention and reply with follow-up questions.

I’m 45. If when I was a teenager, I had developed some curiosity about coding, even if I had never pursued anything related to electrical engineering, the opportunities available to me would have been very different because over time, computer programming became something that mere mortals could gain a depth appreciation for.

This democratizing trend in video is going to continue for a while. There is more fiber optic cable to be laid. Video editing software will get easier to use. Bosses will take a while to adapt communications practitices to a world where everyone’s a mobile movie studio. But it’s going to get easier and easier to capture, produce, and distribute video, and the kids that begin playing around with it now are going to have a tremendous leg up when they hit a job market which by then will be a cicus of multi-media file slingers.