Let's Go To The Videotape
What effect on our students?
In the late 1970s in New York City, where I grew up, there was a sports broadcaster by the name of Warner Wolf. When there was a play that was close or controversial, his signature phrase was “Let’s go to the videotape!” and there would be a video replay and he would make a big deal about it. Which, to be fair, was fairly new then.
That phrase came back to me when I was thinking about this week’s topic. And today I find myself writing about a topic I know little about, and I need your help.
So here is what I am wondering. When I was young, my parents divorced, and we lived with my mother. She did not have a camera, so there were not very many photos of me when I was a small person. Not no pictures, just not many. Sometimes we would purchase a disposable camera with film in it, and get those developed. Occasionally other people would take photos and give them to us. So I do have a few.
The 60s and 70s was a time when home movies started being more available, but it was still pretty rare, and certainly not something we had. So I also have no video of myself as a child.
You see where I am going with this, right? Today, many (most?) of our students have lived in an era where digital photo and video technology was cheaply and widely available. Most of their parents took literally thousands of photos of them at a young age. Video too. And when the children were able to take photos, they took them themselves, which came to be known as selfies. Over their lives, if they wanted to remember something, or examine it again, they could go to the videotape.
I find with my own children that with photos of themselves as a young person they find them “cute” and like seeing them, but it’s not something they dwell on. With video, they are a little embarrassed to see themselves as a little person, playing with blocks, or kicking a soccer ball, or whatever moment I might have captured. But what effect it has on them to see these photos and videos I can’t really tell.
What I am interested in is this question: what effect on our students has their regularly seeing digital captures of themselves throughout their young lives?
Here is my guess, but I want to hear from you as well. Like everything with technology, it has been a double-edged sword. I think it is likely that, in many cases, it has given our students a sense of confidence and strong sense of self. On the other hand, many young people have had bad experiences posting pictures of themselves on social media, and this can be very harming to their confidence and sense of self.
How does this affect our teaching of these students? Does it have no net affect overall? Does it help some, and hurt others? Most importantly, is this something we can use to make our teaching more effective in ways we have not yet considered? Please leave a comment to weigh in - I need your thoughts on this!
Letters of Recommendation
This week, I am recommending the book by Warner Wolf (co-written with Larry Weisman) that tells the story of his career in sports broadcasting: Let’s Go to the Videotape: All the Plays and Replays from My Life in Sports.
(Interesting recent story about Mr. Wolf, who is in his 80s now. In February of 2019, he turned himself in and was arrested for removing some of the letters from the sign outside the development in Florida where he lives, Classics Plantation Estates. He had already complained at a homeowner’s association meeting that the use of the term “Plantation” was racist, and should be removed. They denied the request, and so he did it himself. He ended up paying restitution for damages.)
Q of the Week
The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the American poet Ezra Pound:
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.
I think you're right about it being a double-edged sword. I've got a few observations:
- Most of the young people I interact with seem to be both keenly aware of how to present themselves online but also understand that they cannot control what other people post about them, including candid images. This makes them more cautious around people they don't know well.
- They also seem to have their go-to poses ready. The second a camera comes out, they have suitable expressions on and patiently wait until the click has passed before going back to their more natural defaults. (I think we adults have these two, the difference being that today's youth are much more intuitive about theirs. Or maybe they all practice in the mirror and I just haven't seen it.)
- They are infinitely more creative with their cameras and streaming and sharing technologies than we are. My students find ways to use the technology that never occurred to us. These uses can be both good and bad (especially in finding novel ways to cheat.)
- But the biggest factor, I think, is that they not only see themselves, they see their friends and family and classmates at all stages of their existences. It's not only seeing themselves ten years ago, they see when Dad still had all his hair and Mom was a bit thinner and so on.
All of this culminates in them being far less affected by cameras than we think they are. For most of the past few generations, cameras were a disruptive technology. Over the past 100+ years, each generation had an iteration that brought cameras ever deeper into our lives, starting Kodak and ending with the first generations of digital cameras. But if you're a twenty-year old in 2022, the iPhone has been around since you were five years old. The best analogy I can think of is that they are affected by the ubiquity of cameras about the same way we're affected by the ubiquity of cars - there are good points and bad points, sure, but mainly they just...are.