Documentary Storytelling

I am a fan of documentary film. I know that some might cast me into the tree-hugging, hippie lot because I have watched the work of Michael Moore, and maybe I am. But I think the best thing about Michael Moore and other documentary film is it makes me think. I don't always like the things it makes me think about, but nonetheless, my values and belief systems are challenged.

One of the most liberating things about social media and the accessibility of mobile video is that everyone can become a storyteller. Sometimes those stories are the goofy work of my 13-year-old making little movies about his action figures using his cell phone (and many of us have seen those works posted on YouTube.) And sometimes those stories are live or recorded broadcasts of social justice or injustice, like the activists assembling to protest in Egypt or Iran on the prompt of a Twitter feed, or the capture of police brutality on a street in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles.

This is actually one of the most frightening things about accessible social media. Suddenly, everyone is potentially a subject. There are stories of teachers being recorded ranting at students, individuals taping themselves in illegal acts or inappropriate activities, and kids bullying other kids no matter the location. The voyeurs find themselves captivated by reality broadcasts, the morally righteous find justification for their outrage and the need to dictate behavior, the morally repugnant find an audience of like-minded sympathizers, and the list can go on and on.

But as it is with everything, tools like these are the instruments of good or evil depending upon who wields them.

However, there is perhaps a lesson for us to consider as educators. How do we teach students to be intelligent critical consumers of social media, television, advertising, and other targeted marketing? And how do we do it without inflaming that segment of the population that already believes that schools are tools of the left, instruments of the secular humanists, out to brainwash their kids into being ...(insert evil music)...Democrats!

I don't like to think about the implications of social media tools becoming a way of controlling behavior, a big brother-esque movement to quash inappropriate behavior or to promote some insidious groupthink. But I always fall back onto the notion that the answer to bad speech is not no speech, it's MORE speech. As long as regulators, whether governmental, parental, social, or institutional, don't shut down the means of production or the people who have thoughts from which we could really benefit don't self-censor and fail to share.