Media literacy is:
- being a critical consumer of media, considering purposes and intentions.
- creating media and information for authentic audiences.
- slow and intentional.
Media literacy today looks like being a critical consumer of media, considering purposes, intentions, but then also in the creation space too. So, creating media and information for authentic audiences.
Nick Covington, YouTube and the Death of Media Literacy – YouTube
Remember, media literacy isn’t just about how to be a good consumer of media. It’s also about how to be a good creator of media.
media literacy is regarded as being a conglomeration of a great many skills including the ability to read, evaluate, analyze, imagine possibilities, deconstruct messages, recognize patterns, challenge meanings, judge credibility, decipher sender intent, counter-argue, dig for truth, avoid influence, and produce messages
Plot and Story
Being media literate means knowing the difference between between plot and story.
Scott of NerdSync, YouTube and the Death of Media Literacy – YouTube
You have the plot, …, but you also have the story, which is the rhetorical purpose.
a story is not about the plot or even what happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story, as we’ll see throughout, is an internal journey, not an external one.
Slow Down
Media literacy takes time and requires slowing down.
Media literacy is complicated.
Asking questions takes time.
Social media and the internet more generally incentivizes immediate reactions.
None of the systems that we’re living within want us to slow down. Social media incentivizes quick gut reactions and posting about trending topics even if you haven’t had time to evaluate the evidence or sit and think about your position.
Everything in our culture is telling us to speed up to be more efficient, to consume as much content as possible.
But the good news is that once you’re aware of these forces, you can start to work against them.
Media, all media is made with intention.
As a writer and a poet, I can assure you that every single word a writer chooses is chosen for a reason.
So, whenever you feel a strong emotional reaction towards something, pause before you comment on it or share it. Use that pause to ask yourself questions about what you just saw.
Media is made with intentions. So what kind of intentions might have been put into this?
What do you think the author is trying to do with this thing they made? Who do you think they made it for?
And once you’ve asked yourself those questions, then you can decide if what you’re feeling is fair or not, and then you can decide on how you wanna proceed with sharing it or leaving a comment.
Confirmation Bias
…the primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Copium Addicts: What “misinformation” is actually usually about
Social media actually thrives on confirmation bias, because while changing your beliefs is hard, maintaining them, having them catered to, being told what you wanna hear is easy.
And like I’ve said over and over again, brains like easy.
So social media companies aren’t incentivized to combat these algorithms and instead just focus on giving users what they want.
Our brains really don’t like to be challenged, and a lot of things in our environment have taken advantage of that.
And now a big chunk of our media diet is made up of easy, unchallenging stuff.
Literary Analysis: It’s Not Just Opinion
But this is also somewhat related to one of the most common misunderstandings about media literacy. The idea that media analysis is just a matter of opinion. Believe it or not, there is a difference between analysis, which is aided by good media literacy, and opinion, which is just vibes. When you’re talking about what a piece of media means, that is analysis. When you’re talking about whether a piece of media is enjoyable or not, that’s an opinion.
The textbook, “The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People” explains it this way.
“When we adopt a critical stance toward media, we ask questions about meaning, which is open to multiple interpretations, including competing interpretations. This situation might be enough to make you throw up your hands and despair and say, ‘who cares? It’s all just a matter of opinion in the end.’ This is when validity and a host of principles that can help give us confidence that a statement or story is true, come to the rescue.
Some differences of interpretation are a matter of opinion, but many differences of interpretation can be resolved by considering the evidence for and against each of the competing interpretations.”
The idea that the validity of different interpretations of a work comes down to evidence is actually the underlying foundation of literary analysis.
Intellectual Humility and Evidence
“[Intellectual humility] doesn’t mean you lack an ego; you just don’t put your ego before truth. To be open to learning from others, you need to be confident enough to realize what you know, and what you don’t… Intellectual humility is not an opponent of conviction… You don’t need to thoughtfully reconsider your views about racism when talking to the white supremacists on your doorstep.
…And one reason you don’t has to do with the core meaning of intellectual humility. It means, in part, being open to the evidence supplied by the experience and testimony of others. But ‘evidence’ here is key;
…just because someone comes up to you and says the Earth is flat doesn’t mean you have to take that statement seriously. You can be intellectually humble without, to paraphrase a well-known expression, being so open-minded that your brain just falls out.”
Know-it-all Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture by Michael P. Lynch (pg. 111)
Conflicting ideas can coexist.
…conflicting ideas can coexist.
We should be able to acknowledge that humanity is diverse and that diversity is going to be reflected in a diversity of opinion. But we should also be able to do so without compromising our own values.
I’m going to continue to try to model good media literacy and teach people the skills to engage with media in more literate, more curious ways. Even if I know that cognitive biases and systemic forces are working against me, and if I want people to trust me as a creator, maybe I need to prove over and over again that I’m worthy of that trust.
Because when we all slow down, take more time to think about things, practice more curiosity and humility and open-mindedness, we all win. Society wins. And society wins, not because we’ve manipulated everyone into agreeing with us or because we’ve destroyed all the people who disagree with us. Society wins because media literacy is inherently democratic. Because when we are all more media literate, we’re more open to understanding others’ viewpoints, even if we don’t agree with them.
As Michael Lynch puts it in, “Know-It-All Society.”
“We should not give up on truth and humility and deny their information pollution nor polarization should make us abandon them. When we own what we don’t know and remain open to what others do, we exemplify a basic respect for our fellow citizens that is demanded by democracy. We may never completely realize the ideal of respect, the ideal of living in a society that treats people equally, that achieves social justice, that values truth and reason and that rejects arrogance and dogmatism. But these are goals worth striving for, and it would be perverse to give up on them just when they’re under threat. It is precisely then that democratic ideals matter most.”
