In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article called “The Coolhunt” that has become something of a cult classic. In the article, he follows an employee of Converse whose sole (no pun intended) responsibility was to find “cool” people and note their style trends so that Converse could co-opt them. Gladwell argued that, in a reversal of the “trickle down” model of cultural diffusion (in which elite fashion designers ultimately decide what’s cool), we were now witnessing an era of bottom up culture.

Perhaps it’s a poor parallel, but I notice that the Blueray version of the new Dark Knight DVD allows people to “record and post user-generated commentaries over the film using My WB Commentary.” That is to say, in addition to listening to Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale discuss the movie, listeners can create their own audio commentaries over the Internet. This new capacity seems like a natural development in the people-powered media era of YouTube, but is one with real possibilities for both art and politics (as it becomes more widely disseminated). How about a Ralph Nader commentary on Wall-E? Or Bob Woodward on Frost/Nixon? Or forget that … what about normal people having the ability to provide rich in-depth, long-form commentary on films? It seems to me to be an example of bottom-up culture that allows more meaningful discourse than most of what’s on YouTube.

Is anybody else excited about this technology? Am I over-estimating its potential? Is it inherently too closely controlled by corporate hands to allow for meaningful citizen commentary? Other thoughts?