Shorthand

When I was a kid, my mom made sure that the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy was sitting around the house. (In retrospect, I think the main reason for this was she was sure her little baby would be on Jeopardy and have the face to duel threat of both a Bible Character and US Presidents category.) And, of course, I agree that cultural literacy is an important segment of knowledge...but really, it's just a shorthand for educated people to speed our communication. We can say, someone "has endured neverending unpleasantness by being shat upon over and over by a vengeful and fickle God, but accepts that life is sometimes shitty and goes"....or we can just say someone is "Job-like". Much fewer words. A big concept, boiled down to little symbol.

What I noticed this last week, however, is that this cultural literacy is shifting. Understanding the codes from the Bible -- not so important. (And don't argue that they never were -- in in 1960's South Texas in polite society you damn well better have known who Methuselah was.) Today the literacy is much more about visual and narrative symbols that you have to decipher and not concepts and names. Two examples:

Top Chef is a reality cooking show on Bravo. In the first episode we meet the contestants. They introduce themselves in interviews. This is intercut with footage of the contestants dragging luggage and setting up bedrooms together in the house. No mention is made of this act. Not even a single person saying "Wow, what a great space," or "I can't believe my bedroom," or "The Top Chef House is the da bomb." No voice over explaining that the contestants will live together. No mention that they traveled from across the country to converge on this one space. I sat there shocked, waiting for it to happen (especially after working with some of the network executives I have who don't believe something has been said unless it's been repeated twice by the narrator and once in interview). Of course, I wasn't confused...and no one else was either. It's a reality show -- of course they all move into a house together! No need to explain at all. Just 20 seconds of shots of suitcases going up stairs was all it took. We've come a long way since 1992 when the first half of the first episode is needed just to introduce you to the space and the concept of co-habitation.

Those shots of suitcases and the structure of the reality show are all you need to understand the larger concept of "strangers in a big house / people stop being polite and start being real / etc. etc." If you came in off the boat from North Korea you'd have no idea what was going on. Oh, the rest of the show is explained up and down. Boat person would understand the contests and the elimnations, but the house ritual is a now a part of our cultural lexicon.

Even more visual is the shorthand in a Nintendo game Brianna and I bought a few weekends ago (meaning, I finally got to actually play some videogames with my self-described "video game princess"). Warioware, Inc. is strange in that there isn't one overarching game or one overarching goal. Instead Warioware throws you little 3 second "minigames" one right after the other. You usually get a one one command ("Defend!" "Swim!" "Chop!" and, my personal favorite "Curl!"), then have 3 seconds to not only figure out what you have to do, but also what buttons on the controller will do it. What's interesting is how easy, fun and intuitive it is. The language of video games is strangely consistent. Little line of dots leading from the golfball means "you're aiming this way". The graduated bar graph to the right of the karate chopper means "you have this much power". I only know this from playing other video games. Warioware couldn't have come out for the original Nintendo of the 80's -- it took time for those symbols to become hardwired. Now, these visual cues take no thought on my part -- they've evolved to be part of my cultural literacy.

What does this mean? It wasn't my intent when I started writing this, but I guess I'm making the Everything Bad is Good for You argument. This shorthand will keep showing up in pop culture -- but what starts out in our movies and video games evolves into many things. Computer interfaces, literature, art, architecture and, yes, even religion could all be remapped into our evolving shorthand.