I Know That's Fake & I'll Find the Story
In preparation for the presentations with the class at Art Center School of Design in Pasedena last week, I wanted to familiarize myself with Brenda Laurel's writings again so I checked out her site. On it, I found a wonderful talk she gave at UCLA in June 1999 entitled Making Better Media for Kids. It summarizes wonderfully a number of topics we discussed in class while also keeping a strong positional voice throughout. If you were in the Creative Industries class, it is worth the read.
For those of you who are very pressed for time, I want to pull out two quotes from the speech to comment on.
"We are actually pretty good at distinguishing media representations from life. The problem is not that theatre may be mistaken for real life, but that it may be substituted for it. The stereotypical examples are housewives watching soaps and geeks watching Star Trek. We might add to that list, little boys addicted to videogames. We tell these hapless media victims, "get a life." But we don’t tell them how."
"The impulse to construct character and story out of available materials is part of our narrative intelligence, one of the fundamental ways that humans go about understanding the world. It is very important to realize that to the extent that character is not given by the author, narrative intelligence predisposes us to construct it."
The thing that strikes me regarding these comments is that the suggest a complexity and importance to the topic without insulting people's (and children's) intelligence. Developing soundbites such as "videogames have led to an increase in school violence" insult the mental capacity for all involved. A deconstruction of the problems is necessary and I think the two comments above are very accurate cornerstones for future thinking and I sure already are. I also think there are some good soundbites in those quotes if we need them.
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