I just read a great article in the New York Times by founding Wired editor Kevin Kelly who argues that with the advent of inexpensive digital video recording devices, coupled with vast video sharing and user-generated content websites such as YouTube, we have become "people of the screen." Kelly suggests that our culture is in the middle of a second radical "Gutenberg shift." Though similar to the first shift brought on by the printing press, and the resulting ubiquity of text, we are instead moving from text fluency to screen fluency, and from literacy to "visuality" – the ubiquity of the screen. But, as Kelly points out, while text literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, the emerging screen fluency will demand the ability to parse and manipulate digital video with similar ease. And the new tools created to support this visual fluency just might bring about the holy grail of visuality: to search moving images the way Google can search the Web.

ARTICLE LINK: Becoming Screen Literate

You may be interested to know that the Wachowski brothers who wrote and directed The Matrix, required the principal actors of the film to read three books: Kevin Kelly's 1995 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, as well as Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans.